TESTIMONY OF THE ANCIENTS

Behold... Pestilence found a keyboardist!!!

The late 80s/early 90s were very important to the acceptance of the extreme metal music towards the progressive rock fans, adding technical, progressive and fusion tendencies to the most brutal bands. There were a wide range of bands already playing progressive metal without a 10-20 minutes epic (ex. Monstrosity), but, as you can see/hear, most of death metal bands uses technical riffage and unusual/complex song structure, bearing the "progressive" in it's meaning without being recognized as prog if the tracks aren't lenghty enough. Fortunatelly there were some records to apply the lacking fanservice elements to a regular prog listener, like Pestilence did with Testimony of The Ancients: similar to Edge of Sanity early releases, this album is still pure death metal (different than the next record Spheres, which felt down into proggy prog metal), although it had the power to be called progressive. For me, everything starts with Dan Seagrave cover art, a master of dark surreal/sci-fi area. Well, some could say the band was following the steps by Death and Atheist. It doesn't change the relevance of the album. Kent Smith symphonic keyboards addition to Pestilence here is epic. After every standard track there's a short instrumental/symphonic segue summoning a dreamy fear, as a catastrophical nightmare. The sound keeps aggressive but isn't so brutal. The guitar solos are melodic and catchty, while the musical chords were well chosen and the surreal atmosphere evokes deep feelings.

No they weren't a group of rebel kids just playing hateful music without meaning. At least not anymore.

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