Hey there, tech fiends. It's that time of the week again. Before we dive into today's focus, here's the usual weekly reminder that if you're looking for even more sick bands to hear, all prior editions of this series can be perused here.
This week we return once again with another early premiere for you, this time it's an early album stream of The Scalar Process – Coagulative Matter, out on Friday through Transcending Obscurity Records. As usual, you can read on to learn more about the band and the release, or you can immediately scroll below and start checking it out!
The Scalar Process is a French project that's fairly new, adding their name to the field of atmospheric tech-death wave clearly inspired by Fallujah. There's a lot to love about this release, and in addition to being incredibly well written, the band switches things up with enough frequency to keep things interesting and intriguingly multi-faceted. Beyond the obvious Fallujah influence, you can hear a range of other tech-death styles akin to what groups like Decrepit Birth, The Zenith Passage, Necrophagist, and more are capable of. I can’t put my finger on who exactly to compare it to but there is also a blackened undercurrent to a number of the riffs and passages throughout the album as well which adds another dimension to the album.
If all they did was emulate the tech-death world's best acts in a blasé way, I wouldn’t be super psyched about this release, and I definitely think that Coagulative Matter is damn good. At its best, The Scalar Process shows enough flashes of ambition and originality, especially on its impressive 11-minute title track, for me to cover this as a group that might go on to true greatness later.
More importantly, the field of atmospheric tech-death-focused groups is still very small, so the obvious points of comparison raised here are not bad things to me to be clear. The killer array of guest musician spots is another nice addition, ranging from session drums from Clement Denys (Fractal Universe), a guest solo from Scott Carstairs (Fallujah) himself, guest vocals from Mark Garrett (Kardashev, Viraemia), and a guest piano spot from Tommy Bonnevialle (Virulent Depravity, DeathAwaits).
The Scalar Process – Coagulative Matter is a promising debut from a band I'm now very interested in hearing what they do next. So be sure to check out our full early stream below and see how you feel about it. Pre-orders can be placed through their Bandcamp page and you can follow them over on The Scalar Process Facebook page.
