Ideas of Reference

Psyopus – Ideas Of Reference (Black Market Activities)
Oh. My. God. Extremely technical, complex, insane hardcore/metal. I love/hate this music because it’s so fantastic and utterly mind-boggling, but so damn hard to review. You know the drill. Odd-time drum beats, change-ups everywhere, free-jazz influences all over the place, sick vocals, crazy breakdowns, guitars that squeal and yelp like pigs in heat, dashes of grindcore here and there, and the emo-ish lyrics that we all love to hate. The guitars actually bring to mind groups like Watchtower and Spastic Ink with their squeals, runs, and weird arrangements.

Tracks:
1) Starts with some staccato drumming and riffing, and then wacky guitar, intense double bass, and ends with a neat jazz guitar and breakdown back-n-forth.
2) Drums and guitar are total DEP worship, the rest is really original, slow doomy insanity, a little reminiscent of Goatsblood, but the weird guitar runs and stuff are still there.
3) Starts with clean guitar playing some neat jazzy progression, then sick translation of said jazzy progression into the language of unhealthy grind. Nice.
4) Voice samples, then guitar squeals from hell, drums from purgatory, and Satan himself on vocals. No, it’s actually really beautiful.
5) Wastes no time, goes in for the kill, messy, goes out, messy, in the middle it makes you wanna mosh. Pretty simple, except that the guitar and bass parts are out of this world.
6) Another short ripper, pretty impossible to understand what they’re going for, which is why I love it so much.
7) Two-minute instrumental, just guitar and bass with scream samples, something burning, then speeds up, slows down, repeats, nice little breather before...
8) ...this monster of a tune. Imagine everything above and then some. Pretty intense listen that even includes a wicked little jazzy run towards the end.
9) Staccato riffing, insane guitar and bass runs, excellent jazzy solos, but a ton of FCCs,; they’re pretty much undecipherable, though, so this is OK for safe harbor. Ends at –11:20, and then three minutes of silence, and then 8 minutes of samples, electronic effects, weird noises, some dude coughing up his lungs, piano doodles. Pretty damn weird.