Hey there tech fiends, it's that time of the week again. Before we dive into today's focus, here's the usual reminder that if you're looking for more sick music, all prior editions of this series can be perused here.
Proliferation is a sick group of young and ambitious musicians from Georgia who I’ve covered in this very space twice now already. The first time was for their impressive 2016 EP, Rebirth: The Journey Through Soil, followed by our 2017 early single launch of “Adorned With Mud” which appears on their new album being covered today entitled Woodborn. We’ve got the full early stream of Proliferation – Woodborn for you today ahead of it’s release this Friday, and it's fantastic.
Speaking of last year’s single we premiered called “Adorned With Mud”, that song in and of itself encapsulates a lot of where the groups ever growing prog at the forefront approach to technical death metal ventures into musically this go around. On Woodborn, that comes across as very much indebted to Opeth in a number of ways, but it’s re-combined back with their varied tech-death framework to create something multifaceted and intriguing. The only band that comes to mind who are doing something similar in the present for tech-death is Monotheist who took a similar influence from Opeth at their most deathly inflected earlier this year on Scourge. If you enjoyed that album, you’re certain to enjoy this for a lot of the same reasons.
Even more then past works, this release dives deeper into Opeth and Ne Obliviscaris progressive influenced waters, and it's refreshing to hear Proliferation blending these well-established styles of prog-death into tech-death, not only because it's rarely done the way they're doing it, but mainly because of how damn well it works. Proliferation has an advanced and hyper-specific approach to their style of technical death metal, and they are experts at threading the needle between a fairly diverse swath of influences and stylistic approaches in order to concoct organic sounding progressive death metal infused technical death metal.
Hints of The Faceless, Fallujah, Inferi, and Beyond Creation round out the more solidly aggressive influences swirling in the group’s songs. To put it simply, if an Opeth and Ne Obliviscaris focused take on technical death metal sounds appealing, not much more needs to be said, as that in itself distills much of Woodborn's brilliance. The rich duality and carefully crafted contrast between dark and light energies, between moods dancing erratically but purposefully from uplifting to enraged, is at the heart of what Woodborn is built around. That in and of itself doesn't make a release great, but Proliferation are not amateurs when it comes to songwriting, and I can confidently state that what they lack in pure sonic uniqueness, they make up for and blow past most bands when it comes to the quality and brilliance of their writing capabilities.
Woodborn is a fascinating release to journey through, one that is exceedingly well-written and deftly balances it's progressive and technical aims sublimely while notably eschewing much of the tech-death and prog-death genres tropes in the process. Woodborn is the clear result of musicians who are eager to take steps towards future greatness with every release instead of resting on their laurels cranking out minor variations on the same sound they began with. So jam our early stream of Proliferation – Woodborn below and if you're digging it, you can pre-order the album through Bandcamp here. Be sure to follow the group over on the Proliferation Facebook Page.
