God Is an Automaton

After paring down their sound somewhat on 2009's The Pulse of Awakening, Switzerland's Sybreed made an about-face three years later, back into denser industrialized techno-metal frameworks with their fourth album, God Is an Automaton. While still very much a song-oriented affair, marked by elephantine grooves and big-time hooks, swooping synth melodies and clean-sung choruses, the album never cuts a corner when it comes to stacking and blending these various dynamics with intricate complexity. As a result, tightly bonded Fear Factory-inspired extreme metal guitars and (surprisingly live-sounding) drums serve as the fundamental cornerstones for Sybreed's daring electronica experiments, yielding numerous pneumatic drill-driven assaults that are simultaneously polished to a mirror-like sheen by those self-same accessible songwriting ingredients cited above — as evidenced by such numbers as "No Wisdom Brings Solace," "Hightech Versus Lowlife," "Destruction and Bliss," and others. The band also employs skittish digital rhythms across "Red Nova Ignition," whips robotic vocoder out of the Cynic toolkit for the title track plus "The Line of Least Resistance," and doesn't really lose creative steam until the very last tracks. By that point, though, Sybreed have impressed with the sheer breadth of sonic detail sowed throughout God Is an Automaton's surprisingly memorable collection of tunes.