As Thursday draws near, and those of us in the United States are set to feast on dead bird flesh, we've got two pre-Thanksgiving gifts for your ears to devour ahead of this yearly gluttonous celebration. If you're a new reader to this series, the aim of it is to share lesser known and upcoming technical death metal acts with fans of the genre. Typically doing so two bands at a time, but that's never going to be a hard and fast rule as up to four bands have been featured in a single post in the past. For anyone who likes what they hear below, there are several prior editions of this series to check out here. Without further ado, enjoy the shreds, screams, and scalding blastbeats featured in the music below.

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Epitasis-Decimation Of Gaia



Chicago based outfit Epitasis have been on my new band radar over the last year, and now they've finally given us something substantial to check out with their recently dropped EP called Decimation Of Gaia. While the band is clearly still in the process of finding and developing their own sound, Decimation Of Gaia shows an impressive amount of promise that's worth checking out and buying on it's own merits alone. Though I've been told by their recording engineer, Paul Aluculesei (guitarist from well known tech-death act Warforged) that the material they are set to record for their upcoming full-length is an even bigger step up sound and composition wise than the impress music they've just now released! On Decimation Of Gaia, they stitch together an intriguing mix of the modern hyper-active tech-death sound melded to dissonant black metal chords, brutal slam oriented breaks, and atmospheric entrenched passages. The resulting blend as a whole comes across as quite fresh, mainly due to the compositional prowess of the band than the actual originality of the music on display. But that's not a knock against the band, as their advanced songwriting skills gives them a considerable edge over many technical death metal bands that aren't as adept at writing varied and diverse technical music. Like I've mentioned when discussing upcoming acts in prior posts, Epitasis is the kind of band who clearly show enough uniqueness to warrant paying attention to for their future releases. Jam Decimation Of Gaia below, and in the immortal words of Star Wars, " let the hate flow through you". And I thought I was done with making bad Star Wars "puns", but apparently not!

Decimation of Gaia by Epitasis

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AbouT:BlanK- AbouT:BlanK

It's only natural to pre-judge music based on a bands name and artwork, but you'd certainly get the wrong impression of what Québec natives AbouT:BlanK have to offer if you wrongly judged them only by these two criteria. Although by now, most technical death metal fans rightly pay special attention to Canadian bands within the genre as they seem to consistently deliver at a higher level than most of their peers. And that's certainly the case with the band's impressive self-titled full-length, AbouT:BlanK. Although their record doesn't officially drop until this Friday, November 27th, we've got the early Thanksgiving hook-up a few days early in order to get you hooked on it now!

Overall, AbouT:BlanK largely falls on the melodic and proggy end of the tech-death spectrum, yet rarely feels like anything I've heard before when taken as a whole. There is a nice balance in sound between various styles to keep you interested from song to song and moment to moment. As an additional plus, the production is fantastic and the songwriting is top-notch. To give you a brief summary of the sound on display here, I'm often reminded of a merger between the soaring melodic fury of The Black Dahlia Murder mixed with the adventurous progressive journey that Beyond Creation deliver. If that sounds like an interesting concoction to you, than you'll obsess over each and every second of AbouT:BlanK. If you like what you hear, the record can be pre-order at their bandcamp here.