### Abiotic: Symbiosis

#### 25/02/13 || jaimeviejo

Listening to this album is a transcendental experience. It makes you think about life, death, aspirations, and even the purpose in eating cereal or doing taxes. Any thought can come to your mind when this sterile album plays, anything except wanting to sit down to listen to it.

After five minutes I was dizzy. After 43 minutes I was just impressed at how boring and recycled it was. A second after it ended, my life came back to normality. The only good thing about listening to this album is that once it ends, you won’t remember a single note.

This album should be the handbook of How to Make a Riff Salad Album

Riff Salad ingredients:

01) Ugly as fuck cover with some creature from outer space, monster, or decomposed bodies on it. Terrible font and ugly colors too.

02) Bunch of guys with long sleeve tattoos, muscles, long hair (except one bald guy), and goatees that look like any random dudes that I see walking around the streets of L.A (actually this band looks pretty normal and okay in my book, so I’m not going to get into it too much).

03) Uninspired riffs that last for 2 seconds but that are very fast.

04) Sweep picking (speed of light kind of fast)

05) Melodic Middle-Eastern scales (fast or mid tempo)

06) Thin production sound

07) Triggered drums (ludicrous speed)

08) T-Rex vocals

09) Angry Golum vocals

10) Tough guy vocals from time to time

11) 7 string guitars or higher.

12) Crappy sounding but epic intro.

13) Instrumental song toward the end of the album.

14) 5 string bass or higher with a Fieldy-kind-of-sound.

15) Weird song titles and strange, epic lyrics about civilizations, creations, gods, and space with lots of clever words that nobody knows the meanings of. Lyrics can be about killing too but not in this album.

16) No songs

17) Some electronic elements

18) A video that is recorded at an abandoned warehouse

Mix all these ingredients and you’re likely to get any of these bands:

Abiotic, Rings of Saturn, Thy Art is Murder, Chelsea Grin, Boris the Blade, Make Then Suffer, Whitechapel, Signal the Firing Squad, Boris the Blade, Eat a Helicopter, A Thousand Years of Plagues…

This recipe is not 100% accurate of course; if the ingredients change slightly it can produce a different kind of band. Let’s say, if you remove all the technical ingredients and add lyrics about killing, you will likely get Oceano as a result. Expiration Date: Once you’ve taken the above ingredients and mixed them together, wait six months to find the album in the bargain bin at your local record store.

If this were a instructional music DVD, I would give it a 10, as these guys really can shred, blast, growl, sweat and fingerpick for days and nights, but as an album, this really lacks innovation, songs, emotion and creativity. I always think that bands that are proficient with their instruments should always be able to create great songs. Well, this is not the case till proven wrong, and believe me, I want this band to be good one day because I don’t want to waste my time again listening to something that has been done a zillion times before but better.

- Information
- Released: 2012
- Label: Metal Blade (really?)
- Website: Abiotic Metal Blade
- Band
- Ray Jimenez: vocals
- Johnathan Matos: guitars
- Matt Mendez: guitars
- Alex Vasquez: bass
- Andres Hurtado: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Metamorphilia
- 02. Vermosapien
- 03. A Universal Plague
- 04. To Burgeon and Languish
- 05. Hegira
- 06. Conquest of Gliese
- 07. The Singe
- 08. Exitus
- 09. Facades
- 10. The Graze of Locusts