WARP ZONE

What a great release from Martyr. I was pretty impressed with their debut album from 1997 called Hopeless Hopes but this second album is even better. With Warp Zone Martyr takes a giant step up in the tech death metal world.

The music is still rooted in the tech death metal of the nineties with bands like Atheist, Cynic and especially Death being the most obvious influences. Martyr have their own style and sound though. They play really fast and their music is very agressive mostly due to the angry growling vocals which I find very satisfactory. This is how growling vocals should sound like. Extremely agressive yet understandable. I personally hate the deep subwoofer proccessed growls that many death metal and tech death metal bands seems to prefer these days. I want to hear some effort being put into the growling and that´s exactly what I get on Warp Zone. François Mongrain must have been spitting blood after this performance and that´s the way I like it.

There are lots of different sections in the songs and even though they are about 4 minutes in average there are plenty of complex tempo and time signature changes here to make my head spin. It never gets complex just to show off though. This music is instantly likable because there are recognizable parts in every song that makes them memorable. The complex playing is just a means to an end. The music is powerful and brutal first and then complex. This is exactly how I like my tech death metal to be. I hate it when complex playing takes away the power in music and sadly it happens very often within the tech metal genre.

The musicians are outstanding on Warp Zone. Look forward to hearing these musicians play. It´s impressive.

The production is very good and it´s easy to hear everything that´s being played. With music this complex that´s a very important thing IMO.

Dare I call this a tech death metal classic ? Well at least it´s very close to being one. It doesn´t quite reach the hights that Atheist, Cynic and Death did, but it comes close and I will rate Warp Zone 4 big stars. I´m very happy that I discovered Martyr because their music will definitely be played a lot in my house in the future. This is highly recommendable to fans of tech death metal and especially to fans of Death.