UMUR
"Odyssey Pt. I - A Breaking Sphere" is the debut full-length studio album by German, Berlin based death metal ΔLive. The album was independently released in May 2014 through the band´s Bandcamp profile for a "name your price" option. It says on the Bandcamp profile that the music was composed and recorded by Lenz Lambrecht and Gianfranco D'Amico. The band also mentions a host of guest/session musicians, who contributed to the recording of the album.
Stylistically the music on the album is sci-fi themed technical/progressive death metal. It´s a style of death metal that used to be quite unique and played by only a few acts (Origin comes to mind immediately), but these days the genre is over crowded and many artists playing the style are unfortunately quite a generic listen. That´s not the case with ΔLive though, which might use quite a few of the cliché tricks in the book, but manage to put those tried and true elements together in an intriguing and adventurous way. The music on the 7 track, 39:03 minutes long album is not overtly or unneccesarily complex, even though it´s certainly both progressive and adventurous, and that ultimately makes for a catchy listen with quite a few hooks to hold on to.
Although the music on "Odyssey Pt. I - A Breaking Sphere" is both brutal and played with militant precision (it´s abundantly clear, that these guys are very skilled musicians), it´s also quite atmospheric and the intelligible growling vocals (which are sometimes doubled with more higher pitched screaming vocals) are complimented by the use of clean vocals. The latter with great success, because they don´t drag the credibility of the album down as a consequence of a pop oriented clean singing approach. These clean vocals suit the dark atmosphere and add to the diversity of the material. The use of keyboards are also a major contributing factor to the atmospheric part of the band´s sound, and again the keyboards are not used to sugar coat and polish the sound, but used tastefully to build atmosphere.
The sound production didn´t click with me right away, because I felt the guitars were too low in the mix and lacked some power (they feature a more organic tone, than you´ll usually hear on releases in this style), but after listening more and more to the album, I actually think ΔLive have made a clever decision with that production choice. It ultimately provides "Odyssey Pt. I - A Breaking Sphere" with a more unique sound, that sets them apart from other artists playing a similar style (and after listening more closely the guitars don´t lack power, they just sound different). The sound production is overall professional sounding and suits the music well.
It´s usually a bit up and down in quality with releases made available on Bandcamp with the "name your price" option, but "Odyssey Pt. I - A Breaking Sphere" is a fully professional product featuring high level musicianship, a detailed and well sounding production, and some very clever songwriting. The most important thing is that it stands out among similar releases though. A 4 star (80%) rating is fully deserved.