A successful betrayal of the strictures of classicism with any sort of mastery presupposes that the artist has already felt the wear and tear of rudiments and basic notions of songcraft through their bones, grown as much as possible under the thumb of creation before breaking the ‘rules’, releasing themselves into the the aether of abstraction. On this debut full-length album from Poughkeepsie, New York-based solo experimental metal project ODIOUS SPIRIT no such baseline is set for capability before the vital tendons of readable rhythm and tightened musicianship are clipped and mangled. Because of this ‘The Treason of Consciousness‘ is a bit of a button masher, an approximation of action which ensures a reasonable impression of an extreme metal work with preempted intent to start. As the album grinds and flaps through its machine-fed rambling-on any such gleaming moment that does occur is almost too clearly incidental in the context of the whole work and its lack of fascination with all but the most belligerent methods.

Odious Spirit is one of the newer projects from James Oskarbski who is also responsible for deathgrind project Execrable and post-industrial metal act 8 Hour Animal. The main intent of this particular grouping is stated as something akin to avant-garde death/thrash metal though I would suggest this work should be considered impressionistic experimentation with a “bedroom metal” level of implementation. The main reason I’d intended to take a closer look at this album was for the sake of its challenging movements and how they’d appealed in preview. After taking in the full context I’ll say up front that I did -not- enjoy listening to this album, though I’d stuck around fully understanding not all music necessitates repeatable features, or any qualities that might elicit pleasure in the listener for that matter, to be effective.

Between “Long Stretch of Bleeding Light” and the ~11.5 minute “The Hissing Pyre” we are dropped into what is essentially a bedroom death metal project Hell built from free-form structures, jammed and tangentially related movements which are either abstracted or intentionally misaligned depending on the movement. The actual bones of these structures are brittle, almost incoherently machinated in their automation of non-rhythms that act more as backgrounding to the battle of a blunted-over duo of guitar tones which introduce themselves by immediately crumbling out of sync to start and rarely reconnecting. The effect of disarray, discordance between the two key rhythm guitar channels as they crisscross without sense is appreciable, a frustrated and abominant thing being birthed from a dull guitar tone and haphazard use of EZ Drummer, or a pad kit with limited cymbal options. It surely isn’t ‘With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness‘ levels of insight and mastery as the guitar work never communicates as one, or in more than fragmented rambling, but the basic intent of these pieces is not hard to grasp in its spatial effect.

With each guitar voicing bizarrely ranting in opposing staggered step for the duration of these songs the pacing never quite shapes an actual song, more than half a riff, or any sort of contained statement beyond repeatedly meandering steps through odd grouping of muscle memory built movements, most of which feature drums plainly thumping at unadorned repetitive patternation lacking in punctuation or basic variance. The dysfunction of the opener and the exaggerative press of its companion don’t carry any particular intention as these possessed right-handed judders appear as experiments, best guesses as to how avant-garde composition might work by instinct rather than applying the hard work of bookish detailing (see: Mefitis). Quietly set death metal vocals orbit these events, almost industrialized by the artificial non-relationship shared between automaton drumming and hesitant riffcraft. As the durance of “The Hissing Pyre” developed I’d begun to figure these songs were captured from random guitar jams and set into incidental pieces, an impression of avant-garde death metal which attempts to disobey the rules of typical rhythm without having the fundamentals down.

While this still kind of fits within the bounds of readable death metal music thanks to aesthetic use of growling and simple drum shapes there is no real “thrash metal” sub-genre relevancy on this album from my point of view, unless we are counting a few chugging triplets in the first song as thrash. The choppy call-and-response riff and Ross Dolan-esque hurl of “Gnawing the Fabric of Time” further down the road is probably the most lucid example of death metal dynamics managed before a crossing of three channels worth of wobbly finger-tapped leads haze over the moment to create the vague central point of interest for the song. Pair this with the five minutes of anxious drone offered on “Illuminations” and I’d found it increasingly difficult to take these works seriously, at least in terms of engaging with any intended immersive effect.

On my first sitting with ‘The Treason of Consciousness‘ beyond the preview stage I’d found stepping through those opening pieces didn’t feel great, not for the sake of this level of homebrewed affect but for the lack of shared conversation between any two given inputs, all parts exist together in space and yet battle over nothing without rooting in a moment of unison. “Unbending Follicle, Unending Blight” to me recalled the age of groups like (early) Psyopus where many metallic hardcore bands were using random piano roll runs as the basis for GuitarPro built songs that were stiff, anxious and messier than whatever powerviolence/grind was doing nearby. By comparison this work doesn’t come with any particularly virtuosic touch and instead scrambles and scrapes at seeming random swirls of nearby notes to create intensity and certainly not with the efficiency of statement one might find in particularly indulgent ‘dissonant’ groups such as Ad Nauseam or Knoll.

When a guitarist develops their own style around a host of artificial accompaniment I’d consider it today’s analogue for demo-level conceptualization and in this case we do get an overall impression of what Odious Spirit intends as a coincidental mash of styles arisen from haphazard methods of motoric creation. While I could see musicians interested in developing work from emergent, intrusive thought-guided playing as a listener I didn’t find this album challenging, engaging, or particularly deep beyond a persistent needling of notes one might produce playing feverishly alongside a drum loop. It didn’t end up being the sort of thing I’d wanted to sit with more than a few times, finding a few interesting ideas buzzing through a few songs and dreading the other half upon return. You might feel differently if you’re more engaged with the weirding side of their labelmates, such as recent works from Atemporal and especially Acausal Intrusion as each blurs the edges of sense with modestly realized alternatives to a live-capable band setup. While I am interested in what they’ve suggested on paper the actual practicum here doesn’t yet feel redeeming in terms of challenging work or memorable presentation enough to recommend, though I believe there is enough of an idea there that refining it would be worthwhile. A moderate recommendation.

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