We’ve already sung our infinite praises for the Czech Republic’s nauseating-yet-festive tradition of goregrind, notably with our review for Pathologist’s ingeniously gurglesome ‘Grinding Opus of Forensic Medical Problems‘, vintage 1993. But as the 20th Century drew ever closer to its final, blood-red sunset, it was apparent that a fair amount of sophistication had permeated this previously unpresumptuous brand of Carcass-veneration — a stylistic leap best exemplified by the Bohemian progressive death technicians !T.O.O.H.!: the name being a nonsensically embellished acronym standing for no less a misanthropic slogan as, “The Obliteration Of Humanity”.
The putrid fruit of an intensive collaboration between the two Veselý brothers — guitarist Humanoid and drummer Schizoid — after their self-confinement into a godforsaken cottage isolated in the morbid Teuto-Slavic wilderness, this debut full-length communicates its ambitions even through the cover art alone: that of conjuring an interdimensional sonic wormhole, transcending the realms of carnality onto astral planes of unknown and unfathomable horrors. In this manner, ‘From Higher Will’ is not only an aesthetic contemporary to Gorguts’ otherworldly ‘Obscura‘ (bolstered in no small part by Humanoid’s fretboard tomfoolery and psychotically violent howls), but is comparable even to Demilich in its blackly humorous and paranormally intuitive grasp of the absurd.
Compositionally, there remain ties to the grindcore stylings of wanton riffage, seemingly senseless blasting, and an apparent disregard for consistency in either form or genre that brings to mind the most brow-raising releases by Carbonized, though with a more coherent death metal approach as practiced by Atrocity circa ‘Hallucinations‘. The Veselý brothers also transpose and transmogrify motifs cleverly borrowed from the familiar gamut of the great Czech masters: the alternately jubilant and harried folkisms of Dvořák, the jazz-inflected oddities of Martinů, and of course the carnivalesque and rather ridiculous marches of Fučík. But a closer study actually reveals much more of a musical lineage to the dissonant repertoire of the Hungarian Bartók — in particular, his extraordinarily grotesque pantomime ‘The Miraculous Mandarin‘, which relates the tale of three criminals and a prostitute in their strains to rob and murder a Chinese bureaucrat whom inexplicably resists death no matter how many times he is stabbed or asphyxiated. Indeed, such a plotline seems to resonate well with !T.O.O.H.!, what with their bizarre lyrical handle concerning the foulest indulgences of cannibalism, torture, genocide, random terrorism, vehicular childslaughter — et cetera, et cetera.
Within the bleak decade that has passed following this release, the practice of technical death metal has rightly become an object of derision amongst Hessians: instrumental prowess, rather than serving as a means towards more sophisticatedly adumbrating a musical Truth, degenerated into an end in itself, and subsequently polluted our world with insipidly mechanistic, gaudy, and tautological compositions that spoke nothing of mortal transcendence. Even !T.O.O.H.! themselves, unfortunately, would later fall prey to the same sort of contrived bombast — as if they had put away their holocaustic fantasies and instead taken up egalitarianism. But ‘From Higher Will’ in no way suffers under any such pretenses. Like the work of a mad scientist (or perhaps the Angel of Death himself), this album communicates an emphatic joy in the partaking of its own sadistic experimentations: injecting, vivisecting, and surgically conjoining all the wrong things — just for the hell of it. Equal parts gruesome and eclectic, ‘From Higher Will’ is a lamentably underappreciated work of droll genius, and fully deserves to be heralded amongst the Czech Republic’s greatest musical outputs.
Filed under: Death Metal Album of the Week — Tags: Czech Death Metal, Death Metal, Gore, Grindcore, Neoclassical, Progressive Death Metal, Technical Death Metal — Thanatotron @ November 6, 2010 11:22 — Comments (1)
Do you want the perpendicular magic of obscure Floridian scientific death metal to take you into an extinguished state of bliss? Do you desire opaque fusion rhythms to altercate with your heartbeat causing it to skip steps? Do you dare forsake brutal mosh party antics in order to proceed to a mentally intricate level of personal and musical analysis? An affected bit of text there, I know, but it is impossible to avoid when commencing another run of Pat Ranieri‘s merely 26 minutes long meisterwerk, after half a minute of classical guitar intro cutting the crap and going for the throat with the initial solo in “Nosferatu”, a technical thrash abomination conceived in 1984. With such timeless expression, age hardly matters, but it’s worth mentioning because these guys were both thematically and musically far ahead Cynic‘s and Death‘s new age postures and theoretically just might have predated Atheist as well, who anyway beat them by a year in debut album release. Hellwitch‘s banquet table of speed metal, thrash and death metal can justifiedly be called non-organized, but that is exactly because the band shows no mercy in letting loose a sensual storm of associative significance, a swarm of noises including ridiculously angular solos and voices manipulated into cyborgian declarations. 
Despite the abstaining running time, a notable richness of taste and fullness of effort permeates this album, from the Renaissance touches in “Mordirivial Dissemination” to the speedcore foreshadowing of Deicide’s “Legion” which characterizes “Pyrophoric Seizure”. Thrash influence dominates in the use of short riffs and sparse punk influenced tremolos underneath elaborate and abstracted solos as in the tightly minimalistic spouting of syllables in lyrics that can hardly be called trivial even while there is an unjustified use of thesaurus; a frightening urgency of seeing a world falling into an apocalypse with the promise of demonic saviours permeates the text, gripping the heart of those not lured into false optimism by the pact society has instated upon an instinctively barbaric man. “Syzygial Miscreancy” manages to be metal from the mind of a zen priest and the mind of a panicking computer all at once – it hardly surprises that Antti Boman of Demilich has paid them tribute by guesting on their 2009 comeback album, which probably should be gotten under scrutiny somewhere in the future, before we all get blown by one catastrophe or another into this primordial plasma described (especially through Stravinskyian guitar work) by Hellwitch.
Whereas the structural and musical approach would not constitute for an FM-radio listener’s definition of ‘progressive’ this album is highly important and innovative in many ways. Given a nice thickening fuzz that anticipates the textural approach of the pioneers of Greek and Norse black metal, Mike Scaccia’s rhythm guitar is middle range yet lacks the crunch and the preferential techniques used in speed metal (constant palm muting, an emphasis on staccato), having a much smoother sense of transition in execution than many speed metal and death metal peers. This also allows the other instruments to stand ground within this framework, helping a sense of musical advancement and accomplishment that is beyond mere head-banging fodder. Good word must also be given to his solo playing, which is intricate and whilst not dissonant evokes the more dignified of neo-classical shredder playing crossed with the King/Hanneman sonic attack.
Casey Orr’s bass as a result of this is made just as audible and distinct as the percussive backdrop, and almost as if to capitalise on the dark and foreboding atmospheres that Slayer and Possessed first realised on early works, we get a textural sense of craft that anticipates the outcomes of many important metal acts to follow, two major examples being Massacra and Mayhem. Bruce Corbitt’s vocal delivery is the typical rhythmic-cohesive delivery that is a mainstay of this musical field. It has lingering sense of camp in it’s mildly gore-fantasist lyrical depictions, resembling a cross between Dave Hewson of Slaughter and John Connelly from Nuclear Assault, with more of a rasp than a sung tone to it, perfectly fitting and well executed. Along with the work of Californian thrash unit Cryptic Slaughter, these Texans should be considered one of the more important missing links in the structural advancement of the extreme metal that was to flourish from the late 1980′s, and onwards…
