Engineering the Rule

After cutting their teeth on some of the most challenging and inventive extreme metal ever conceived, as members of the re-formed, new millennium touring lineup of legendary Floridian death/jazz architects Atheist, guitarists Sonny Carson and Chris Baker decided to put their unique "education" to good use. Joining forces with vocalist Kevin Freeman, bassist Stephen Morley, and Atheist drummer extraordinaire, past, and present, Steve Flynn, they formed Gnostic, and set about exploring the limits of their own jazz and prog-inflected death metal with 2009's Engineering the Rule. Only, this being the '00s, their particular recipe also contains trace elements of math-metal and deathcore, so it wouldn't be surprising if modern listeners with no knowledge of Atheist's recorded legacy from the early '90s simply presume them as such; and, let's be honest, it takes a degree in music theory to decipher the semantics of subgenre terminology on this level. The bottom line, however, is that, much like Atheist's old material, textbook Gnostic riff collisions such as "Visceral," "Isolate Gravity," and "Violent Calm" stop, start, and turn on a dime before thrashing off in wholly unexpected new directions. They rarely divert into "true" examples of jazz except for very brief interludes in "Sleeping Ground" and "Life Suffering," but rather take inspiration from the genre's restless arrangements and unorthodox time signatures, leaving it to serpentine melodic scales to weave in and out of the reigning organized chaos, in a desperate attempt to bind everything together and make head or tail of it. But then, making sense of it all is ultimately secondary to indulging in the sheer brilliance of the band's musicianship, as they pull off these instrumental gymnastics. And although the bulk of Engineering the Rule will lead to a rather hectic (heck, epileptic) mosh pit experience, sporadic bits of linear rhythms nestled within the likes of "Composition" and "Splinters of Change" offer a minimum of head-banging predictability (and also elicit those deathcore associations). Taking all this into account, it's fair to say that Gnostic succeed in delivering a mind-twisting LP, quite worthy of their heroes, but they naturally lose a few points for originality, in the process, and still have some work to do before they can match Atheist's groundbreaking genius and irresistible weirdness.