ABSCISSOR
ABSCISSOR “Metanoia”
By Dr. Abner Mality
We have here a new act from Chicago that has big ambitions. They want to make sure everybody knows they are not locked into one sound, one genre, one style. They can do just about everything except bluegrass and mumble rap. Does it work? Can they chew what they’ve bitten off?
Well, they can play, I’ll say that much. From progressive tech-death to monumental post-metal and many points in between, they have the tools. But can they do actual songs that stick in the head...the only measuring stick that really matters for any band? Not in my book, they don’t.
This thing suffers from a lot of bloat. 11 tracks here, almost all exceeding the 7 minute mark. And a lot of the 7 minute plus tracks sound longer than they actually are. It’s kind of a riff salad that works only some of the times. My eyes glazed over at several strategic points and not always during the mopey post-metal stuff, either. There were heavy, aggressive sections that seemed equally flat. I found the entire “Live Through” trilogy to be a bit of a slog. Now there are certainly parts where ABSCISSOR hits things just right...there are some head-crushing riffs, some tricky prog passages and even some soothing melodic drones. But for me, it just didn’t seem to hang together. It dragged.
I can’t even begin to drop all the names ABSCISSOR reminded me of, but CYNIC, GORGUTS and THE OCEAN come to mind. There are tons more. It’s a smorgasbord of metal styles, but not stitched together as well as it could be. Editing is needed. The talent is there. Perhaps they just need to scale back their ambitions to a more digestible level.