Album Review: Cranial Osteotomy – Vortex Of The Dark Knowledge

Album Review: Cranial Osteotomy – Vortex Of The Dark Knowledge

Reviewed by Eric Clifford

Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind; in light of which, lets start off by saying that Cranial Osteotomy’s debut fifteen years ago was…not very good. And it’s worth underscoring that, because it allows you to then make the point that this, their followup a decade and a half in the making, is a step up from the first album in almost every way.

Just about every aspect of Cranial Osteotomy’s game has had an upgrade. They’re tighter and more technical. More vicious. Faster. Angrier. Honed. They’ve taken the raw slam of the debut and retooled it into a brutal death surgical set with which to debride bits of your brain matter. An instrumental (“Praecursor”) sets the mood and then we’re off with the plunging grooves of “Thanatomorpheus” which crunch into place with the ominous clunk of breech-loading shells into artillery. There’s so much more going on. The gun cabinet is raided for endless intersections of high-calibre chugs and sprinting tremolos, drums lacing an already varied performance with swift syncopated fills and blastbeat marathons. “Dipping into Sombre Quagmire” slips between carving and boning knives with nifty high/low tremolo sections and then packs the wound with chunky grooves. Seriously tasty riffs pop like burst zits all over the place – “Cathedral Butchery Feast” alone carrying enough weapons grade blasts ‘n grooves to get the blood of any self respecting brutal death fan pumping – which is handy, considering the type of competition they’ve got so far this year. Bands like Vile Desolation and Thaetas have unleashed scorched earth campaigns, and while Cranial Osteotomy aren’t quite on that level, they’re nonetheless doing themselves proud in ways that will no doubt mine vats of serotonin from the sweaty, cargo-shorted degenerates in the brutal death community.

I think this album is the tits. But I say that as a somewhat worryingly fanatical fan of the genre. Lets say, though, that you aren’t. Lets say that you come to me, plop this album down, and ask me to sell it to you. I think I might struggle. It’s combinations and recombinations of gurgles and grinding intensity are done very well over each song, but each song also kinda does the same thing, and so it’s difficult to isolate specific points where the tracks step outside the box or indulge their weird sides in ways that I might be able to use in justifying a recommendation of it over any other similarly competent but conventional example of the genre. It’s lacking a level of individuality that distinguishes the top dogs of the genre, like the mind ablating technical supremacy of Beelzebub’s favourite jazz band Defeated Sanity, or the almost planetary heaviness of Devourment. Those aren’t really complaints as such – it’s not as though the album does anything wrong per se. But for the next album I really hope that the band find a defining X factor that allows them to stamp their presence into the scene as more than just very good practitioners of an established blueprint.

It’s true that it’s not exactly surprising as an album. Familiarity apparently breeds contempt, but it never quite has when it comes to me and stuff like this. Your mileage might vary though, and if you’re less attached than I am to having your eardrums fed through a combine harvester then little here is going to convince you otherwise. With that said, if the band keep up their current trajectory we’ll hear basically jack shit from them for fifteen years and then they’ll drop a masterpiece. I hope that we all live that long, because this band has the talent to pull something magical off. Lets hope they have the vision.

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