HARDWARES

Tim Gutierrez, Kevin 131, and Eric Forrest (vocals, and not vocals and bass, as he plied with Voivod) return with a second record of bewildering sophistication a notch up on the purer thrash of the debut. Indeed The Conjoined ping-pongs everywhere sonically like Lyzanxia or Mnemic, and like those bands, and like the old schoolers these guys are, there is no truck played to metalcore – this is grim art for extreme fans of substance. Hell, even Killing Joke is evoked, and Grip Inc. (!), as the guys smoke-choke grey and greyer metal often crumpled in Meshuggah-like origami whammies (proceed to title track, which inside that dizzying fray, even manages to bring in horns like Dimmu now and Lucifer’s Friend 36 years ago). Strings, industrial bits, spoken samples, blastbeats, tastes of all those big black metal bands when they went proggy and/or ploddy (mostly Satyricon)… it’s all here in impressive collage form, along with a coursing Voivodian vibe, a bit weird, given that Kevin and Tim are the main writers. Of course, Eric is there singing like a hollowed-out chain-smoking raven, but he’s not exactly Voivodian himself, more of an anomaly of that band at a weird yet under-rated caustic time well under the radar.