Band: Diskord/Atvm | Album: Bipolarities | Genre: Technical death metal, Progressive metal | Year: 2024
From: Oslo, Norway/London, UK | Label: Transcending Obscurity
For fans of: Atheist, Artificial Brain, Gorguts
I’ve covered at least two split records on here before, both from Ripple Music. (There have been a couple others I’ve considered, but I’m not sure I’ve actually written about them.) One is the stellar stoner/post-/prog metal collaboration between Howling Giant and Sergeant Thunderhoof. And the other is a study in contrasts with Wizzerd and Merlin taking opposing spins on stoner metal and heavy psych. Bipolarities is more in line with the former, as both Diskord and Atvm play complex, tangled varieties of death metal.
Diskord hails from Norway, and they’ve been around for a while. They’re not the most prolific band out there, but they’ve got three solid albums of tech-death under their belt. Atvm, meanwhile, is a newer band whose debut record I absolutely loved.
Diskord’s half of the LP comes first, and it bursts forth with “Onward! To Nowhere”. The rhythm is expectedly irregular and ever-shifting, and I really like the flanged tone on the guitars. It seems like every 20 seconds, the band shifts their focus to a new and exciting riff, but there’s still a sense of coherence and continuity to it, somehow.
“Pass the Baton” is slower and more lurching. The percussion, though, has a frenetic quality that helps keep things lively. The midsection has a spooky, horror movie soundtrack-sounding passage, which is a lot of fun. In contrast, “Shivering, As We Shed Our Hides” is high-energy and bursting with unique riffs. Much like on the opening cut, the band can’t seem to stick to more than one riff for more than a few measures before switching it up. But the riffs complement each other so well that, while it keeps you always guessing, it never feels disjointed.
Diskord’s half of Bipolarities ends with “Cogged Pother”. It features the band’s usual twisting, tangled riffs, but they toss in some more stretched-out, high-pitched solos that make this stand out a bit more compared to the other three cuts they provided.This is definitely my favorite of the four Diskord cuts presented on this record.
Where Diskord provided four songs over 14 minutes, Atvm give us just two songs totalling 21 minutes of music.
The first of Atvm’s songs is “Cancer”. From its opening moments, it calls to mind some of Atheist’s best work. The bass is jazzy and forward in the mix, the riffs are complex, and there’s some uncommon inclusions in the percussion. Atvm adeptly moves between chugging, pummeling riffs and more fluid, speedy passages that draw equally from death metal and classic prog. The hoarsely-bellowed vocals–while completely inscrutable–fit the desperate mood of the music perfectly. The closing minute of this song features an especially enthralling, breakneck passage.
Bipolarities closes on its longest song, Atvm’s 12-minute monster, “Morphine”. This song does an incredible job of blending harshness and melody. Though the forward momentum is incessant, where “Cancer” saw the band turn on a dime, this cut instead focuses more on repetition and gradual change to build a sense of weight. That’s not to say this song is without sudden shifts; they do take a Latin jazz break about five minutes in. It’s a nice, fun interlude. From this jazzy passage, the band dabbles briefly in a few other moods before plunging headlong back into death metal. Atvm do an incredible job at bouncing around from style to style over the last few minutes of “Morphine”, eventually concluding on a jazzy note.
Bipolarities is a very fun split LP. Diskord provide us with some terse, to-the-point tech-death. The riffs are complex, nasty as hell, and too numerous to count. Atvm, though, are the real stars of this record. Their two epic cuts are shining examples of what tech-death can achieve in the hands of skilled songwriters.
Score: 83/100
The Elite Extremophile 