{"id":102678,"date":"2024-03-08T00:00:06","date_gmt":"2024-03-08T00:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/?p=102678"},"modified":"2024-03-20T11:39:00","modified_gmt":"2024-03-20T11:39:00","slug":"album-review-defect-designer-chitin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/album-review-defect-designer-chitin\/","title":{"rendered":"DEFECT DESIGNER – Chitin (2024) | Album \/ EP Reviews @ Metal Forces Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"

DEFECT DESIGNER
Chitin<\/strong><\/span>
\n\"\"
\nTranscending Obscurity (2024)<\/span>
Rating: 8.5\/10<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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And Norway does it again! After being blown away but Sovereign\u2019s debut album Altered Realities<\/em><\/a>, along come Defect Designer with their third full-length outing. This act \u2013 who were originally created in Russia during 2007 before relocating to Oslo in 2012 \u2013 seem to have slipped under the radars of many, but hopefully with this effort they\u2019ll receive some much deserved attention.<\/p>\n

Riddled with complex arrangements, peppered with bewildering blurs of speed and coated with a film of puzzling dissonance, it seems ideal that this album\u2019s release coincides with the snarling Sovereign effort. From its crazy cover art courtesy of Ian Miller to its entangled depths of quizzical death metal churning, this is the sort of platter that rakes the senses and requires several listens to even scrape its kaleidoscopic surface.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know why a band like Disharmonic Orchestra came to mind, maybe it\u2019s those perverse and unorthodox twists as \u2018Uglification Spell\u2019 is frantically stirred into a melting pot of barbed bass lines from Martin Storm-Olsen and scowling vocals from Dmitry Sukhinin (Diskord). \u2018To Ziggurat\u2019 drifts on a wistful solo while a gradual cold shower of sinister oozing begins to cascade before the transformation into a serrated riff. Fleshgod Apocalypse drummer Eugene Ryabchenko constructs a mighty monolithic wall especially on \u2018Simulacrum\u2019 with its torrential blasts and dehydrated yelps, but deep within there are a plethora of infectious grooves and strains of humour.<\/p>\n

\u2018Gaudy Colors From Your Plastic Bag\u2019 slows the pace, yet on its title alone adds further levels of peculiarity to this smorgasbord of surreal, abrasive extremity. The album is also punctuated by a strange and short interlude in the form of \u2018Nu, Pogodi!\u2019, which was the name of a classic Soviet \/ Russian cartoon series. So it\u2019s a very odd brew that is served up by a band that is as comfortable at churning out jazzed up death metal as it is epileptic prog rock.<\/p>\n

\u2018Story Of A Styrofoam\u2019 is a wild fusion of what seems to be chaos and creativity; how these guys conjure such bewildering and spasmodic passages I\u2019ll never fathom. To further prove their strangeness, Defect Designer throw \u2018Shine Shine\u2019 at us, a straight up heavy metal tune with extra abrasive scours and yet oddly fronted by Soilwork\u2019s Bj\u00f6rn Strid whose clean yet powerful croons seem vastly out of place. It\u2019s my least favourite track on the album just because it\u2019s so out of place, even amongst the grating contortions of \u2018We Will Need Your Chitin\u2019 and the cosmic chugs of \u2018Insomnia\u2019.<\/p>\n

Jazz thrash, math grind, avant-garde death… it\u2019s all here, a miasmic cauldron of zany and at times comical wizardry for those with tangled membranes and knotted veins.<\/p>\n

Neil Arnold<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DEFECT DESIGNERChitin Transcending Obscurity (2024)Rating: 8.5\/10 And Norway does it again! After being blown away but Sovereign\u2019s debut album Altered Realities, along come Defect Designer with their third full-length outing. This act \u2013 who were originally created in Russia during 2007 before relocating to Oslo in 2012 \u2013 seem to have slipped under the radars […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,5615],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-album-ep-reviews","category-defect-designer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102678"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102679,"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102678\/revisions\/102679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}