India’s ECCENTRIC PENDULUM are a band that, despite not producing many records over the course of their 16-year history, have managed to create music that is distinct from the vast majority of their peers. Their style is characterised by a blend of death and thrash metal, along with a liberal dose of metalcore and progressive touches, which has ensured that even their earliest releases possessed an imaginative and powerful feel, with their debut album, 2012’s Winding The Optics, having a broader musical scope within it than some band’s entire discographies do. Excluding an EP, single and live album, this was, until now, the only album the band released. Their latest, Perspectiva Invertalis, sees their already magnificent and bold sound take on an even more diverse element, peppering hints of black metal, doom and even industrial into their heady mix of influences, and featuring some of the best and most ambitious work of their career.
Churning Of The Blood Ocean starts things off with a tight, technical and subtly dissonant piece of progressive death metal built upon angular guitars, intricate drums and searing vocals, lurching from hyper-focused, polished hooks to a denser, chaotic edge that helps lend this a darker undercurrent, eventually leaning into a demented side as it reaches its climactic moments, making for a varied and imaginative opening salvo. In Pretence shifts the music towards a groove-laden style, with several experimental elements, notably from the guitars, introducing a jarring quality into many of the hooks, with the acerbic vocals matching up extremely well with this harsher approach to the musicianship.
Encaged Visions Of The Unobstructed pushes the progressive components of this album to the forefront, with bubbling bass, ethereal passages on guitar and sudden tempo changes making the crisp death metal at the core of this album sound decidedly visceral, making sure that no single idea is dwelt upon for longer than necessary and keeping the listener enthralled. Cyclic Vicissitude moves to a slower pace and weightier yet melodic guitar sound, with the vocals morphing into rumbling gutturals and the militaristic gallop of the drums providing an authoritative rhythmic backbone around which the lighter, adventurous riffs and sonorous backing vocals are imposed, being incredibly punchy where the previous song was abrasive.
In Exile strikes a balance between the sharper, catchier sound of the preceding track and the belligerent, wide-ranging nature of the album’s heaviest songs, with every part of the music feeling monolithic and injecting a palpable atmosphere that underpins even the most cacophonous sections, again scaling back the overt experimentation in favour of short, sharp shocks of impactful energy and a bridge that utilises cleaner distortion to make for a tight and biting sound.
Narcissistic Myopia is a great slab of chunky, disjointed death metal with a buzzsaw thrash edge that is perhaps one of the most straightforward tracks on the album, although the sort of inventive guitar work and abrupt shifts in tempo mean that there’s still a progressive element that informs the sound. This, more so than other tracks, toes the death metal line quite solidly, without betraying the virtuosic musicality that has been a cornerstone of the previous five efforts. Immersed In Reverence possesses all the hallmarks of a great album closer; a slow-burning, gradual move towards its climax, dark, emotive undertones and a varied sound that brings together all the record’s key musical styles. There’s a greater emphasis on grating flourishes, and the band’s experimentalism takes on a central role in the songwriting, although the death metal that lies at this record’s core is never too far in the distance, embracing a warmer, more atmospheric sound that makes for a brilliant conclusion to this album.
ECCENTRIC PENDULUM are one of those kinds of bands that have an impeccable ability and natural chemistry for songwriting that makes everything they put out singularly brilliant, with even 2017’s Tellurian Concepts, a short yet impactful EP, being every bit as effective and progressive as their two full-lengths. Writing interesting and varied music is clearly part of the band’s DNA, but it has to be said that on Perspectiva Invertalis ECCENTRIC PENDULUM have outdone even their most impressive work, managing to strike that delicate balance between being incredibly catchy and simultaneously inventive and creative with the genres that it employs, making it very easy to be immediately drawn in by this record. Hopefully fans of this band won’t have to wait another dozen years to hear new material of this monumental scope, as it’s clear that they are more than capable of crafting something that’s on par, if not slightly better, than what they have created here.
Rating: 9/10
Perspectiva Invertalis is out now via self-release.
Like ECCENTRIC PENDULUM on Facebook.
