These days, “technical death metal” seems to have become a euphemism for “metal only musician geeks will care about” – an endless parade of shredding and time changes and one-upmanship that sacrifices basic melody and song-craft in favor of just showing off the band’s skills.

Glory be to Sweden’s Anata, then, who play tech-death that never gets bogged down in musical pyrotechnics. Anata’s music spirals, unravels and comes back together, seems almost multi-dimensional – like the musical equivalent of Abbott’s Flatland – but most of all, it’s just really good. Facile shifts between raw, bleeding slabs of vitriolic metal and epic, ruminative prog ensure that Anata will have cross-genre appeal. The Conductor’s Departure is expansive, almost all-encompassing – the rare tech-death album that lives up to the potential of the genre.
-AR

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