JUPITER

Atheist are back! And it's like they never were gone. Surely a candidate for metal album of the year, their fourth album "Jupiter" is jam packed with technical death metal, progressive metal, thrash metal and jazzy goodies (although this album is less jazzy than both "Elements" and "Unquestionable Presence") - and there's even a bit of slapping and popping bass in a couple of places..

In a way, it sounds a bit like "A Piece of Time", "Unquestionable Presence" and "Elements" and yet it sounds different from them; that is, Atheist, I think manage to draw on their corpus of music, taking the best parts, and adding new elements (pun not intended), thus creating an album in "Jupiter" which seems like a natural evolutionary step musically - and maybe that's one of the reasons why this album makes it seem like it was last year that "Elements" was released. I mean, the fast death-thrash parts that we know from "A Piece of Time" are back, the jazzy weirdness that we know from "Unquestionable Presence" are back, and the Latin influences from "Elements" are back, and they're seamlessly combined into a masterpiece of an album.

Just check out the opening track which, "Second to Sun", simply is a cascade of unusual chords, weird drumming and strange changes and riff figures. Pure genius! "Faux King Christ" is another fantastic track with its use of fast Latin drum figures combined with general metal carnage. The production, i think is crisp and clean, but to my ears, we are not talking overproduction here. The guitars have a razor sharp sound, and in some riffs, they wound like a swarm of Africanized killer bees on the rampage.

As the truly very knowledgeable J-Man points out in his review over at metalmusicarchives.com (this review was originally posted there), this is all killer, no filler and so I cannot give this album anything less than five stars.

Recommended to Atheist fans, and to fans of tech/prog death metal in general - they certainly should check out this come-back album by some of the pioneers of technical and progressive death metal (although this is closer to thrash metal than death metal really).