Pestilence
Testimony Of The Ancients

THE REVIEW

In the difficult attempt to successfully accomplish the arduous task I set for myself before sending the review of "Spheres," that is, to review the last three works of Pestilence (I'll leave the review of "Malleus Maleficarum" to the brave BathoryAria, who will certainly do it... right?)
hoping to win your approval, I am preparing to complete the work with this "Testimony Of The Ancients" from 1991 (really?), the third work of the Dutch trio (indeed, here they were three for reasons I will explain in more detail in the following lines) who have managed, over the years, to excellently combine the fiercest death metal with the most technically sublime jazz fusion.
Successor to the bone-crushingly violent 1989 album "Consuming Impulse," a great collector of praise from critics and fans, which saw the band tackling the purest, fastest, and most violent death metal emulating the epic feats of bands like Napalm Death, Morbid Angel, early Death, Deicide, Obituary with clearly Slayer and Kreator influences (is it spelled like that?), this highly anticipated album, which had been announced by Patrick Mameli as "more melodic and intelligent" than its predecessor, truly turned out to be a gigantic leap in quality, with more listenable and slow melodies, songs filled with ultra-melodic solos (magnificent the one in "Land Of Tears"), perhaps also thanks to the departure of legendary singer-bassist Martin von Drunen, who went to Asphyx: von Drunen was, in fact, the so-called "hard-core metalhead" of the group, not very inclined to "melodicize" the songs and the general sound of the band, which according to Mameli "was starting to tire of the usual chaos."
However, while Martin's departure marked the band's fortune, allowing them to breathe more freely and experiment, bringing the band to a technical-compositional standard that had nothing to envy from contemporary techno-death metal bands, it also left the group without a singer and bassist (the latter, particularly, was for the band the classic "cursed role," similar to what happened to Slayer with various drummers). But Mameli & company were certainly not the types to take it easy, replacing von Drunen's terrifying and cavernous growl with Mameli's transition from guitarist to guitarist-singer and (listen up, bassists) temporarily enlisting THE bassist of the time, that crazy supernatural jazzman named Tony Choy, who at the time was part of Masvidal and Reinert's band (the Cynic, for those who didn't get it) only to be replaced by another "master bassist," Sean Malone, and going on to work with Atheist.
Indeed, the arrival of Mr.Choy brought a breeze of "oriental flair" into the group: this, combined with the fact that for a while mastermind Mameli had started listening to jazz fusion, was the cause of the album's magnificence, essentially prog-death with fusion hints.
Eight tracks, interspersed with as many instrumental "interludes" perhaps not always functional but really nice ("Impure" I really like a lot uahahaha), brought the album on par with other masterpieces of the time: but the element that further elevated the album was the lyrics, which had undergone another maturation from the already mature ones of "Consuming Impulse." The album, as you can easily understand, is a concept album about life and existence ("Testimony Of The Ancients: The Quest For The Truth Of Existence") and I am not at all worried about comparing the quality of these lyrics to those of the contemporary masterpiece "Human" by Death.
Musically, the album presents itself as very aggressive, with excellent instrumental parts overshadowed by Mameli's beautiful growl (it seems very similar to that of the poor Chuck) and Foddis's commanding drumming, regularly followed by the radical power of Choy's simply frightening bass, which although not at his best (he had to learn all the album's songs in just one day!!!) offers an absolutely impeccable performance, with passages and pleasant interventions, reaching their peak in his beautiful "Soulless," where he mixes chords with single notes with astonishing clarity. Surely we are facing one of the best bassists that metal (and not only) has ever had. The two axes definitely deserve a mention, cutting and breaking as they should, and highlighting the great technical-qualitative leap of the second guitarist Uterwijk, while Mameli is, as usual, at his highest levels. I still have to decide which I like more between this and "Spheres."
Prog-death, never neglecting its thrash origins, with elements of fusion, impeccably played by four masters who have been able to innovate the genre without ever forgetting where they come from: what more could one ask for?