Artist: Kenos
Title: X-Torsion
Type: Album
Label: My Kingdom Music

Anyone who arrived early at the venue last time Vital Remains hit these shores would have seen a strange little Italian band called Kenos completely outclass the headliners in musicianship and song-writing ability. And furthermore, if I hadn’t have seen them in the flesh, it would have been hard to believe that humans were capable of recording something as awe-inspiring as ‘X-Torsion’. The vision that this album embodies is absolutely incredible, and although perhaps a tad too ambitious in some ways, brings so many new sounds to the table, all can be forgiven. Trying to sum up this monster is completely impossible, but a small idea would be to imagine the technical polyrhythms of Meshuggah, alongside the dynamic progressive sensibilities of Opeth, plus the symphonic grandiose elements of Emperor and Becoming The Archetype. And we’re still nowhere near…

There are a couple of slower acoustic moments on this album which bring the listener down to earth, but for the majority of this album, the playing is absolutely inhuman, from the insane drumming of Sergio Gasparini, blasting and double kicking at insane paces, to the ridiculously technical guitars of Domenico Conte and Jacopo Pisciotta, conjuring riffs that couldn’t be imagined by most bands. This is technical death metal without the scattergun ‘chuck every riff you can into the mix’, but it is a well-measured heavy / slow balance which works wonders on the senses. Whilst no two tracks are the same, or even two moments of a track the same, there are some skirmishes which lean to one genre or another, such as ‘X-Torsion’ which is predominantly thrashy, or ‘Bitchswitch’, which would put most Swedish melodic death metal to shame. There is a potential problem with all this slicing and dicing, and although it didn’t get on this reviewer’s nerves, the genre-surfing might not be to everyone’s taste. For example in ‘Room Sexteen’, a fairly heavy number, we have the addition of female vocals randomly in the mix, whilst the presence of two gothic-sounding acoustic narrative tracks, ‘I Remember’ and ‘Erocktika (Desert Dancing Raven Queen)’ may seem a bit odd to some.

A very, very interesting album, and whilst Kenos’ ambition may sometimes be their only downfall, Kenos have put out one of the finest albums of its caliber. And it’s certainly one of the finest albums ever in the progressive-technical-gothic-thrash-death metal field you will ever hear, and probably the only one at that!

http://www.kenosweb.com
http://www.myspace.com/kenosband

James Young

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