ALBUM REVIEW: Designed Obsolescence – Continuum

Blast beats? Check. Shred? Check. Physically demanding riffs? Check. Relentless, uncompromising pace? Check. With all that, it looks like you’ve got the foundations laid for an archetypal technical death metal album. The actual components of the style aren’t difficult to work out. It is a genre built on speed, complexity, and the incontrovertible desire to shout, “Look what I can do!” At first, it can seem pompous, perhaps even arrogant, but after wading through several hours of sixteenth note triplets, arpeggios, and sweat – oh, so much sweat – one might just develop a taste of it. It’s an acquired taste, to be sure. It takes patience and mental stamina, at times, to listen to and appreciate, or actively enjoy a genre that does naught but challenge the listener. Thus, the entire genre is a challenge – a challenge to do better than what you just heard. This is where CONTINUUM come in. 

To start with, their new album Designed Obsolescecne fits every definition and description of technical death metal one could conjure up and more. From the frenetic, frantic speed with which the record delivers its content, to the neo-classically tinged lead work interwoven throughout, Designed Obsolescence is about as archetypal as it gets in technical death metal, and this quality both works in its favour, and in some aspects, against it.

What Designed Obsolescence does well, it really excels at. The guitars are well rounded, springy, and walk the delicate line between digital and analogue sounds with apparent ease, spreading a chaotic miasma of expertly chosen notes across the album’s half hour length. Beneath these is a well-mixed and equally demanding bass, and drumming to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best of the genre’s contemporaries. As a technical death metal album, Designed Obsolescence is objectively correct on all accounts.

The only detractor is that its archetypal approach ensures that, in a genre designed to challenge and push the boundaries of musical ability further than previously thought possible, Designed Obsolescence doesn’t feel like anything new. It offers little to the genre that has not been offered before. That said, perhaps CONTINUUM do not need to challenge anyone. For with the core elements of the genre, they have crafted a competent and compelling listening experience, one that does not compromise songwriting to simply cram more notes into a bar. Designed Obsolescence, despite its refusal to push any further, is an appropriately measured effort.

While it should, by all accounts, fall under the descriptor “generic”, Designed Obsolescence, in a world where every tech-head is trying to break the rules, has chosen to play well within those lines, and achieves much in merely becoming an embodiment of the genre. CONTINUUM have used this album to prove that they, as a band, are undeniably skilled, and talented songwriters to boot. The album certainly shows off its members toeing of the line between the complex and the necessary, and for what it achieves within the style’s parameters, it cannot be faulted. A worthy effort, if not ambitious.

Rating: 7/10

Designed Obsolescence is out now via Unique Leader Records. 

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