THE ZENITH PASSAGE “Datalysium”
By Dr. Abner Mality
The question arises: how tech is “Datalysium”? And the answer comes thundering back: “None, none more tech”.
Progressive death metal assembled by AI is what this album sounds like and it’s a strange, challenging sound indeed. I usually like my death metal red, raw and bleeding, but I’ve always made time for the likes of ATHEIST and PESTILENCE. And I like to occasionally dabble in DREAM THEATER, too. There are traces of all those bands here, but the ZENITH PASSAGE sounds VERY mathematical and precise, almost as if it were chopped up and reassembled by an algorithm of some sort. The playing is just unreal...it’s hard to imagine fingers nimble enough to play some of the super choppy picked notes on “Lexicontagion”, “Deletion Cult” and “Axiom of Error”.
The sound is intriguing but inhuman. Maybe it’s inhumanity makes it intriguing. The aggression of death metal is here, especially in the vocals which are for the most part the typical roars you would hear, But a lot of the guitar solos are in the John Petrucci style, with plenty of melody. As the album proceeds, we start to hear more keyboard work, mellower digressions and even clean and female vocals. It climaxes with the title track, which is the most melodic and proggy on the album. And perhaps this progression from the machine-like and robotic “Axiom of Error” to the expansive and more human sounding “Datalysium” is intentional.
This is never gonna be my preferred style of extreme metal but there’s enough sheer weirdness and jaw-dropping moments here to make THE ZENITH PASSAGE worth investigation.