Monochromatic Black – Predacious

Monochromatic Black is a unique force in extreme metal. I found this band just as they had released their first song, ‘The Herd’ and I fell in love, or rather I was destroyed into love, from the very first audition. Since then, I’ve confidently called myself a fan and rated both their previous releases, “Pneuma” and “Vicissitude“, a heartfelt 10/10. The reasons for this are complex but to keep them short I will just say, this band stays at the top tier of deathcore while at the same time dabbing into a variety of adjacent subgenres. Elements of technical and progressive death metal, blackened moments as well as a very unique atmosphere contributed to my being overjoyed by all their music up until this moment. Plus their sound is as unique as it is monstrous. And now, they’ve reached their third release: a humbly sized but violently tempered 5-track EP titled “Predacious“.

If you’ve seen the rating on this review, you can probably tell that this release didn’t blow my mind quite as efficiently as their previous work. And I will dive into the reasons for that right away, but not before reassuring you that this is still a stellar release that you shouldn’t sleep on.

“Predacious” pushes the brutality and technicality to the extreme. It is bound to test the performers’ limits and to have them break a sweat. But that’s not new. What is new is that compositionally, this is their most chaotic release to date. And that says a lot given that their music was already a maelstrom of machine gun drumming, roaring riffs and constantly shifting time signatures. However, with “Predacious”, the energy is shifted slightly from powerful and dominant, to restless and unsettling. The composition feels more disjointed and fragmented, with a lot of musical choices coming across quite random. The constituent elements are still awesome. The riffs are chuggy and groovy, the drum parts are blisteringly fast and dominant, and the bass lines are super tasty, often leaping into the spotlight. But the way these pieces are tied together to build a song is less fluid. The songs feel somewhat botched together like a Frankenstein of riffs that don’t tie into each other very well. The breakdowns are also less integrated into the songs. They feel separated from the flow of the music and are also a bit more generic in a deathcore fashion, with tempo slow-downs, spaced out chugs and isolated cymbal hits for monstrous effect. And another change that came about is the reduction in guitar leads. While some licks and melodies still show up, there’s no section that I would refer to as a solo.

Monochromatic Black – Turn the Tides

On top of this, the tracks are actually separated, while the previous albums flowed from one track to the next without interruption. What this amounts to is a more rudimentary take on Monochromatic Black‘s sound. You can easily hear that it’s the same band, but in certain ways it feels like they stripped down a lot of the sophisticated fluff, and almost voluntarily chose to make this EP a bit more messy and muscular. I personally don’t enjoy it as much as I did the previous albums, but I don’t want to be harsh on them for taking this change in sound. For one, it still wipes the floor with any generic deathcore album out there. So we need to keep that in mind. Also, I’m not sure I would want them to keep doing exactly what they did in the past. Trying out new things is what allows artists to keep evolving and stay interesting, and after a while, I’d rather see something I enjoy a little less, than another offering of the same thing I’ve already heard before. I also want to mention that ‘False Kings’ breaks the pattern of chaos and it’s probably one of the more groovy and accessible songs they wrote.

Vocally, this EP is just as ferocious as it is Predacious in title (I’m sorry, I had to). Tanya Beickert is one of my favourite vocalists specialized in the fine arts of disgustability. She can deliver all the guttural filth that a deathcore album requires, but her articulation and control brings a more diversified sound, allowing swift changes between gargantuan monstrosity and sharp, snappy aggression. In these 17 minutes she probably touches on scream sounds fitting any extreme metal genre, from traditional death and black metal to deathcore and even some grindcore tendencies. And on this EP, she switched the clean singing parts to spoken word, which makes the songs even more raw and primitive.

Monochromatic Black – Maligned

Lyrically though, I am a bit let down. ‘Hail The Queen’ is quite interesting and allows various interpretations, but ‘Turn the Tides’, ‘False Kings’ and ‘Maligned’ are showing some fairly simplistic confrontational lyrics without much musicality or flow. And ‘I Am Time’ gives a “chase your dreams” cliché that I feel would work better in a power metal song than on this monster. It just doesn’t match the sound all that well. But I have to praise how they used lyrics to make me, a self-proclaimed fade-out hater, enjoy the fact that they closed the EP on a fade out. They made it artistically coherent by preceding it with the word “sink”, in the context of describing a bitter man on a path to self destruction. The sound, matched against the word, paints a picture of that ever growing decay and fading into nothingness.

That’s a long review for a short piece of music, but that’s because a lot of things happen in these 5 songs. It’s nice to see Monochromatic Black making some changes to their sound, and I’m very curious to see where they go from here.

Track List:

1. Hail the Queen (03:32)
2. Turn the Tides (03:06)
3. I Am Time (03:51)
4. False Kings (03:36)
5. Maligned (03:34)