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Exivious: Exivious

03/12/09 || GardensTale

Okay, so I was in the record store, right? Just browsing some albums with Deathspell Omega, Church of Misery and Anaal Nathrakh already firmly clenched in my grubby hands. I see this weird cover with a lot of squiggly lines and a sticker on it, with a handwritten band name and description and shit, and the name on there was Exivious. So I was like, dude, I heard that name before. And that was like, 5 fucking years ago, and it sounded sort of promising then, a bit like Cynic though I didn’t know Cynic at the time. So I grabbed it and went like, over to the counter and went to the counter guy, like “Counter guy, pop this in the player if you will, ‘kay dude?”. And he was all like “Sure bro”, and he popped it in there and pressed, like, the play button and shit while I went headphone-mode for real!

And then…

Compelling and complex guitar architecture commenced to soar through my cranial membranes, diverting other thoughts to places unknown, the technique and composition on display such a staggering bending of the mind I knew my Acquisition of the Day had revealed itself to me.

Okay, I’m out of difficult words now. Not a native English speaker, okay? Anyway, it does sort of describe the effect the album had on me. This shit is complex, but it’s not extremely difficult to listen to or anything. The balance between showing off skill and actually entertaining listeners who are not skilled musicians themselves is perfect and that’s a big applause to the songwriting. Not too strange seeing as the main man plays guitar in Cynic, and the bassist does live work with them. There’s some guy from Textures in there too. I don’t like Textures, but the drums on here are eclectic and awe-inspiring, so bonus and a cookie for that.

To describe the music is a little difficult. Basically, it has the instruments and basic sound of progressive metal, but the composition and songwriting of experimental jazz. The whole thing is entirely instrumental. One of the instruments is always going into wild experiments; most often the guitar, but on “Asurim” the drums get a lot of space and there’s “Ripple of a tear” to show off some of the bass work, as a few examples. All of it is played virtuoso, but the composition makes sure there’s space available between the bouts of mind warping technicality in the form of more atmospheric pieces or ever so slightly less complex and ever so slightly more catchy returning sequences, functioning as a kind of chorus.

All in all, I reckon someone who can play well himself will enjoy this more than your average scrub, so it’s really a musician’s album. Nevertheless, anyone can enjoy the sheer technicality and intriguing melodic patterns and songwriting. The biggest downside is that it does flow into each other a bit, as songs tend to be alike by definition. That effect probably lessens with time, because this baby needs a lot of listens, and there is definitely variations on the theme, like the “All that surrounds” two-part atmospherics and strangely chipper “Waves of thought”.

The Exivious I heard 5 years ago was very different from its current incarnation, but I’m not complaining. Normally I’m not the biggest fan of technical music, I’m an emotion-listener rather than a think-listener, but Exivious manages to appease to both and show the beauty of either. So congratulations on a very fucking fine album, boys. You earned it.

Information
Released: 2009
Label: Independent
Website: www.exivious.net
Band
Tymon: guitar
Robin Zielhorst: bass
Stef Broks: drums
Michel Nienhuis: guitars

Tracklist
01. Ripple of a tear
02. Time and its changes
03. Asurim
04. All that surrounds pt. 1
05. Waves of thought
06. The path
07. All that surrounds pt. 2
08. Embrace the unknown
09. An elusive need

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