��Here's album number three from the ferocious, reptoid-obsessed California prog-death band Embryonic Devourment, delivering more of their crazed, ultra-complex tech-blast and bizarro visions of an Earth enslaved by malevolent reptilian aliens. These guys have been one of my favorite American tech-death bands going back to their debut album Fear of Reality Exceeds Fantasy, with a ridiculously intricate style of progressive sci-fi obsessed death metal that blends together raw, chaotic riffage with confusional, labyrinthine arrangements, huge bone-grinding grooves, flourishes of weird spacey jazziness, and soaring, epic guitar work. All of their albums are crushing examples of complex technical death metal, but with the addition of those odd, jazz-fusion influenced elements, some really bizarre vocals, smatterings of almost Gorguts-esque discordance, and the whole obsession with the mythology of British author David Icke's "reptilian agenda", Embryonic Devourment turn into something distinctly weirder than your typical tech-death...

�� Once again, the band explores the agenda of our reptilian overlords with this latest album of dizzying, complex prog-death, the eight songs all seeping with the band's paranoid end time visions, which range from Icke's twisted conspiracy theories to the machinations of a sinister shadow-world steeped in Masonic malevolence and Egyptian and Christian mythology. Opening up with a swell of sampled orchestral dread, the band quickly launches into their near relentless assault of complex, brutal death metal with "Challenging All Forms of Hope", a blast of vicious chromatic riffs and complex time signature changes. From there, the album continues to contort as each track unfolds into another dizzying rush of spastic, discordant riffage and pummeling, swirling drumming, shades of that spacey jazz fusion creeping in with sheets of processed guitar texture and eerie diminished chords, the sound often splintering into sickening atonality and delirious shred. As before, the band makes deft use of atmospheric passages within their otherwise convoluted and confusing riffscapes, contrasting the complexity of their music with sudden shifts into sinister ambience, weird Middle Eastern rhythms and ululating screams, and smears of strange jazzy shadow that just make the serpentine riffgasms sound even more hostile and dangerous. While those not addicted to this sort of absurdly tangled prog-death would probably find Embryonic Devourment constant onslaught of ornate insectoid riffing, confusional math-death, pummeling angular rhythms and thunderous double bass exhausting, it's definitely never boring. And in those moments when the band shifts into those killer jazz-flecked passages, they can recall some of Atheist's best stuff. Definitely check this out if you're into angular, twisted, off-kilter death metal.