Pestilence
Spheres

THE REVIEW

Finally, a truly great album. I confess, it has been a long time since I last found myself saying such a thing about a metal album. When Pestilence released this "Spheres" back in the distant 1993, I was nothing more than a drooling brat who certainly wouldn't have been interested in the music scene of those years, especially in death metal. Alongside the usual small and large commercial crap, a new subgenre was blossoming under a veil of indifference, vulgarly called jazz-metal. What a grotesque name! Critics coined this definition not knowing how to classify that strange and misunderstood music disseminated by Floridian groups like Atheist and Cynic, in which violence for its own sake is shaped and reshaped by undisputed technical prowess. Pestilence too, led by guitarist Patrick Mameli, do not shy away from playing their part in this highly talented field.

Led by guitarist and singer Patrick Mameli, Pestilence, after showcasing all their brutality and skill in their early works "Malleus Maleficarum" (1988), "Consuming Impulse" (1989), and after laying new promises for sound innovation with "Testimony of the Ancients" (1991), continue unwaveringly to elude classification, once again astonishing the record market with an unrepeatable product. Besides the established Patrick Uterwijk (guitar) and Marco Foddis (drums), the group recruits bassist Jeroen Paul Thesseling, whose undisputed technical abilities blend magnificently with those of his bandmates in each track.

The result is a unique sound, never so refined and enchanting, thanks to the digital pickups used to distort the scores. And here we open a parenthesis. Being as conservative as I am, this whole story of "too artificial" guitars smelled a bit fishy to me, as I'm more inclined to the raw and unadulterated fits of the strictest thrash tradition. I had to change my mind when noticing the absence of a keyboardist in the lineup. But how? The album is full of melodic openings, scattered here and there even within the individual pieces, sensual and effective in their deceptive simplicity. Credit goes to some session musician in the recording studio? Not at all. The elegant work of those four Dutch boys with their respective traditional instruments catapults the listener's ears into a dreamy journey, through the unknown realm of the human mind. Dreams, visions, and reality intertwine in the ambiguous lyrics of Foddis, in exciting poetic-musical tensions found in tracks like "Personal Energy", the title track "Spheres", the powerful "Mind Reflections" or "Changing Perspectives", just to name a few. The instrumental tracks "Voices From Within" and "Phileas" are exceptional, noteworthy simply because they are stunning, even in their brief duration.

"Spheres" is all this, and much more. Discovering it will be a pleasure, loving it a duty.

Highly recommended for those who love music, totally inaccessible to the masses.