New Jersey’s prodigious Avant Garde Death Metallers Replicant have reissued their 2019 EP ‘Hypochondria of the Machine’. This two track offering marked the band’s first non-self produced musical outing with both mixing and mastering being handled by Rob Torres (Windfaerer, Tombstoner).
The opening track ‘Hymns of Distress’ begins with a woeful sounding and abnormally tuned clean guitar progression before the band proceeds to come into the fray with a pea-brained chugging attack that seems unusually straightforward for Replicant until the familiar intelligent, dizzying, dissonant assault rips the listener away from any feelings of complacency. The band eventually coalesces on another, much faster and utterly blood pumping chugging section before they slowly evaporate via a doomy trudge of an outro. The latter side of ‘Hypochondria…’ features the slightly shorter ‘Limbic Thrust’ which sees Replicant swiftly transitioning through mixed stages of agonised grooves juxtaposed by swift drum tempo switch ups with Michael Gonçalves’ distinct ghostly howling invigorating the tense sound of the track.
In light of the subsequent albums following ‘Hypochondria of the Machine’ it’s evident that the members of Replicant must suffer from potentially fatal allergies in relation to releasing music of quality below that of very high bar that they have set for themselves and these two extra tracks will only continue to further enthrall fans of the band’s more recent works.
