Tholus — Constant

It's finally here, the death metal project by former Estradasphere-drummer Dave Murray and Mike Johnson who wrote the music and played guitar. The place to celebrate his love for technical death metal like Cynic and Atheist, combined with that for jazzdrummers like Morgan Ågren and Steve Gadd.

Not so much a band (at least for the recording of this album), there are as many as ten musicians involved in Tholus. Not counting Richard C. Hoagland who (unknowingly) provides the themes around which the music is structured. Hoagland is a former museum space science curator and a former NASA consultant who since the early seventies has been posing impopular theories (by his scientific peers anyway) about extra-terrestrial lifeforms on Mars and the moon and samples of his voice are a red thread on the album. Short ambient skits have him talking about conspiracies, cover-ups and secret experiments.

The constant heavy riffing and bizarre rhythms and leads make this music hermetic and difficult to one, but all the more rewarding to others. As you would expect the drums in particular follow paths less common in the world of death metal. Unlike his former band and his other project Träun you don't find much 'genre-hopping' here though. There are some strange elements here and there, like the Tibetan chants in Expropriated, are incorporated in a more subtle fashion, so that this is undeniably 'death metal', yet complex and not very eager in revealing all its secrets after one spin. The fact that there is a method to the madness, make that Constant maintains its fascination. Not to mention the jazzy groove throughout.

Timetravel is a theme that's not too far away from the alien subjectmatter on Constant, so that the music is a bit of a timewarp to the first half of the nineties isn't all that weird. The small wave of jazz/death metal of that era is ominous in the music of Tholus and if you like bands like later Death, Pestilence or even Fredrik Thordendal's Special Defects and such, this will surely please you. If you are, the complexity and strangeness (by strict death metal standards) will probably not be all that problematic.