Deviant Process: Nurture

Often bands will wax lyrical about their philosophy towards the writing process, in many cases sounding overly pretentious bordering on, or in many cases leaping over the border line into pure self absorbed wankery. Deviant Process has walked this tightrope but for the most part I would say successfully. They claim to want to break away from the formulaic tropes of technical death metal, such as, a million notes per second, the prerequisite blast beats and the obligatory BPM count. Yet for all intents and purposes all of these are present in their music. They do however also state that their influences span far beyond only death metal. All the band mates have delved into Jazz, Classic Prog and Classical Music for inspiration and Nurture certainly also has all of these elements present and accounted for throughout and to great effect. Their desire overall is to create memorable, meaningful music that isn’t just a display of their vast technical abilities and I think the band can rest assured that on that part of their self evaluations they are definitely successful on Nurture.

From the first track “In Worship, In Blood� we see the obvious evolution from their already fantastic and widely praised debut Paroxysms. That album was an artistic statement in its own right, however, to my ears anyway, Nurture feels like a compositional level up. The influences I mentioned above are more refined and the integration more seamless. Their sheer playing prowess is on full display here through every second of this album, but as I already discussed this was not the band's main intent. All baked into the chaotic insanity of the performances is also the emotional and artistic component and there is plenty here to digest over many listens. This is a musically dense album and is certainly not an instant and easy listen. This album is not only challenging for the band to perform but it also challenges the listener to invest their time and effort into it to reap the full rewards hidden within the firestorm.

Lyrically the themes on Nurture are varied and I’ll quote bassist and lyricist Philippe Cimon to clarify, he says “A common aspect to every song is the use of esoteric or mythological references to express a relation to a certain theme, be it substance abuse, trauma and its consequences, faith, solitude, or man’s lust for power. However, the themes are sometimes brought up in a way that is very unclear and lets the reader make up his own explanation of the text.�

The Music on Nurture is complex and furious and most definitely fits in the technical death metal camp however for the great majority of the album they are successful in making it also a strongly artistic statement. In other years Nurture would likely be a contender for album of the year but this year has yielded so many amazing albums in the genre so it has been somewhat lost in the mix. That should, however, not deter any fans of technical and progressive death metal from spending a good amount of time with this album. I think anyone who sinks their teeth into this beast will be glad they did.

Lineup:
Jean-Daniel Villeneuve: guitars, vocals
Stéphane Simard: guitars, backing vocals
Philippe Cimon: bass
Michel Bélanger: drums

Tracklist:
1 - In Worship, In Blood (07:32)
2 - Emergence (05:20)
3 �" Asynchronous (05:42)
4 - The Hammer Of Dogma (05:50)
5 - Syrtis Magna (05:57)
6 - Homo Homini Deus (04:37)
7 - The Blessings Of Annihilation Infinite (07:49)
8 - Cybervoid (Obliveon cover) (03:56)
Total playing time - 0:46:43

Added: January 15th 2022
Reviewer: Benjamin Dudai
Score:
Related Link: Band @ Bandcamp
Hits: 682
Language: english

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