Review: Veil of Maya - Eclipse

 When the newest wave of bands to be influenced by the technical metallic wizardry delivered from Meshuggah and SikTh started to create an entire sub-genre out of the onomatopoeic sound of these juddering riffs, well we found ourselves noticing this style to come under the name of "Djent". Perhaps the idea of categorization isn't a good one all the time. Many people have developed a strong hatred for the term that was coined and sent around the world by Maryland metallers Periphery and have developed a desire for the band to die as a result. Which to be fair is a bit strong. Anyway, since it's inception... djent has actually opened up gates for a lot of other bands who have also been making their music as complex and intensely technical as possible, but before any of this bizarre categorization came along, Chicago's Veil of Maya were juddering away and as they come back, they come back sounding as solid and monstrous as ever with their fourth release Eclipse.

 Well, whether you like to call it Djent or now, the guitar playing is absolutely astonishing, the skill of Mark Okubu in being simultaneously melodic, intricate and brutal in his in-your-face riffing insanity. Songs like Punisher and the delirious Enter My Dreams show this without any great difficulty and hearing complex guitar picking with a variation in time-switch signatures accompanying an array of meaty breakdowns shows the groups skill in adding a little more brainpower and class to music that is supposed to serve as a cue to senseless violence. 

 And amongst all this skull smashing musical bludgeoning, and deathcore breakdowns, there's also an underlying grace to be found in this album. Sweeping behind the metallic madness lay ethereal soundscaping. Tracks like Divide Paths and the instrumental title track use this to make the music much more beautiful in it's craft, while the sludgier The Glass Slide and epic closer With Passion and Power makes the whole track atmospherically more ominous and bleak, a feeling that is only elevated by the monstrous growls of Brandon Butler.

 So with their musical ideas being set on epic in terms of brutality, complexity and melodic power, Veil of Maya have created an album of undeniable force and solidity with Eclipse. It's an album that meets polar opposites in it's playing. It can be simultaneously ambient and brutal. It can be filled with juddering deathcore assaults and be graceful sounding. It's the most artful that technical death metal has been made to sound. Long live Djent!!!!

 Veil of Maya's Eclipse is out now via Sumerian Records. The band will tour the UK in May with Betraying the Martyrs, Vildhjarta, Structures and Volumes.