New York City isn’t a place you’d expect a technical death metal band to rise up from. Usually it’s Europe or someplace further North, but the Big Apple isn’t the most intense environment to blow listeners’ eardrums to hell and back. Pyrrhon blasted the doors off their hometown in 2011 with their first LP An Excellent Servant, But A Terrible Master, and now they’re back three years later with their sophomore album The Mothers of Virtue. It’s an untapped well of potential, full of intensity and dexterity for the progressive death metal field, but The Mothers of Virtue never congeals, and ultimately, the various tracks become more disjointed than unified.
Pyrrhon are frighteningly comprehensive in their music; they leave no stone unturned, no genre untapped with The Mother of Virtues. The doom metal cylinder spins in the brooding intro to “White Flag”, while a groovy grinding guitar line appears in “Balkanized” and the roar of chaotic noise blasts in “Invisible Injury.” There really is no pattern that Pyrrhon follow, no congruent sound or influence that sticks through across all nine tracks. That being said, the gems are there. The thunderous doom metal of “Eternity in a Breath” is potent, but raises itself up with occasional tonal shifts, while “Sleeper Agent” is a mighty solid track, one of perfect length for the shifts in sonic tone throughout. But the overall lack of cohesion hurts what would otherwise be a solid record for any death metal fan; The Mother of Virtues really doesn’t know what it wants to be.
The band’s most consistent sound is the kind of progressive death metal, the blistering wall of metal sonic blasts and very frequent tempo shifts ripped right out of the book of The Dillinger Escape Plan. It’s maddening, but it’s done remarkably well, even if the shifts in mood and speed rarely reach the kind of psychotic synergy that Option Paralysis from Dillinger had. The distinct lack of melody and the overhauled sense of death metal intensity is very noticeable, and while that might satisfy the more dedicated fans, this noisy tradition rarely reaches anything particularly memorable. The songs on The Mother of Virtues are also much longer than many songs from Dillinger Escape Plan and other death-prog bands, so the shifts in tempos are usually stretched out too long. The title track is a whopping ten and a half minutes long, and while it’s able to sustain itself respectfully with changes in mood, the overarching sound displayed stays consistent a bit too much. Mix that with avalanches of furious guitars, gatling-gun fire drum smashes, and guttural vocals from frontman Doug Moore and you have an album that’s one enormous blitz through death-prog insanity.
And it’s hard to say what Pyrrhon should do down the line. Although it is unrefined right now, the over-the-top math-prog influences spread across songs like “Implant Fever” are tight and technical enough to satisfy fans. On the other hand, the more experimental songs like the sludgy “Eternity in a Breath” or the gazing noise of “Invisible Injury” have potential as well. When combined, however, there’s a disconnect where it’s hard to tell what kind of music they want to make. This leaves The Mother of Virtues in a tough spot, one where the promise is there, but they need a lot more to make something special happen. If you dig technical death metal, you’ll probably get the most out of The Mother of Virtues, but with such rough variety and unrefined tone, I can’t in good faith say that this is the defining record of the genre. It’s not bad; it’s just not focused.
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Additionally, you can still try your ears at the title track, currently deafening the weak courtesy of MetalSucks at THIS LOCATION as well as teaser track “Balkanized,” currently streaming HERE.
