Conveyor - An Incarnated Abstraction

Death Metal has been through a long way since its dark dawn in the mid 1980s. It has reached a peak soon after by the early 1990s and, as it seems, it doesn’t look like to be having a downfall. I say that because Death Metal has created itself an imagery, or an aesthetic, that seems to be all around. If Heavy Metal has split itself in several subgenres, so has Death Metal. Some of them are so different from the pioneer bands that the only link with them are the vocals. Yeah, it seems that the glue that bonds all Extreme Metal bands is the shrieking, harsh, gritty, guttural vocal. However, even the vocals aren’t that equal as it mat seem. Many bands are struggling to vary to offer fans the same aggressive with different vocals textures.

Well, that’s not the case of Conveyor with “An Incarnated Abstraction” which struggle to be a band that offer a technically complex performance. “An Incarnated Abstraction” is an album with very complex guitar playing. The thing is that Conveyor don’t follow the same path most technical bands follow. I mean, guitars phrases and riffs aren’t based on simply going up and down major and exotic scales in a way to seem complex. Guitarist Bartek Domanski builds his performance using lots of dissonances and tempo breaks. He seems to be playing jokes with his guitar with all the time and counter-time notes he performs. “An Incarnated Abstraction” is technically complex also because of its experimental verve which is led by the ‘broken’ guitar notes. If you pay enough attention, note that blast beats in Conveyor are done by the guitar, not by the drums only.

Let’s go back to the vocals thing, shall we? As I told before, vocals are the glue that bonds Extreme Metal bands. It’s a fact that this kind of guitar playing takes out much of the power and the bone-grinding spirit needed to be extreme. That’s why vocals need to be that way. They are a reminder of whom they are in despite of all the experimentalism with the guitars. That’s what Conveyor did in“An Incarnated Abstraction” where guitars were free to look for new directions. It’s a come and go all time. Guitars fly away to then come back to the good old Death Metal bone-crushing. The outcome is technically amazing.

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