MITOCHONDRION — Archaeaeon (review)

Album · 2008 · Death Metal

4.5/5 · 2024-05-28
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The Canadian MITOCHONDRION which got its start in Victoria, British Columbia in 2003 is amongst a new breed of dissonant death metal bands that has popped up since the late 1990s with the intent to craft dense ominous atmospheres as its primary focus and in the process incorporating myriad methodologies of extreme metal techniques to generate a chaotic and complex surrealist’s soundscape of otherworldly metallic bleakness. Founded by guitarist / vocalist Shawn Haché and guitarist / bassist / vocalist Nick Yanchuk along with early members bassist Nick Gibas, guitarist Mitch Aramenko and drummer Jesse Anderson, the band experienced the usual turmoil of lineup changes before settling as the four piece of Haché, Yanchuk, Godard and Gibas.

While following in the footsteps of bands like Portal, Gorguts, Ulcerate and Pyrrhon, MITOCHONDRION developed its own stylistic approach early on thus setting itself apart in significant ways. Primarily steeped in the world of chaotic and dissonant death metal, MITOCHONDRION spawned its first early convocation ARCHAEAEON in 2008 as a self-released limited edition of only 666 copies but due to the its rising popularity has since found the proper label support on the Dark Descent label which remastered this debut in 2011 and has reissued it with completely new cover artwork. The remastering was performed by none other than metal avant-gardist Colin Marston of Krallice, Dysrhythmia and Behold… The Arctopus fame. The music while more accessible than most of Marston’s output offers a plethora of metal stylistic approaches that deliver a turbulent descent into the an atmospheric yet intense metal encounter.

ARCHAEAEON successfully weaves together a tapestry of metallic savagery owing as much to the burgeoning modernities of technical death metal as it does the more continuous streamlined flow of the old school variety. Often compared to Deathspell Omega for delivering an order to chaos approach, the blackened avant-garde tones and bleak barbarity of the musical flow is undeniably intense in nature and yet utterly impossible to pigeonhole into an established subgenre of the metal universe. While chaotic and dissonant in the vein of Portal or Ulcerate, ARCHAEAEON delivers its descent into darkness in a martial stylistic approach akin to going to battle as if the band crafted its own metallic vision of some of the classical soundtrack moments on epic films such as The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. While many disso-death bands excel in complexities that offer curveball drifting into time signature rich frenzies or atmospheric abstractness, MITOCHONDRION delivers a fairly uniform rhythmic procession through the entire 71 1/2 minute run of ARCHAEAEON.

The band proves on this debut that it exhibits the perfect flow of consciousness that is punctuated by moments of atmospheric respite as well as delivering an incessant cascade of martial rhythmic guitar riffing, war metal style drumming techniques and moments of lead guitar soloing that offer more than enough variety to keep the entire album from stagnating even for a single track’s worth of playing time. The tracks are cohesive in how they interact from one to the next and the confluence of the death metal techniques with black metal and occasional doom metal excursions provides the perfect recipe for a well-crafted album’s worth of technical yet not too abstract strain of innovative death metal. It would not be an understatement to call the overall feel and mood of the album epic in scope and instrumental fortitude. The secret of the album’s appeal is that it never allows you to fall off the trajectory set forth. The incessant riffing and marital drumming styles keep you enthralled in the battle at hand and the excessive arsenal of variations that decorate the rhythmic flow are vast in scope and maintain a highly aggressive and satisfying delivery system.

This album was one of those love at first spin affairs but after a fair number of repeating attentive listening experiences it is also one that has a surprisingly satisfactory staying power as all the elements are so perfectly strewn about in a way that doesn’t allow your attention to drift off and destroy the momentum. MITOCHONDRION has proven itself to be one of the major players in the modern world of the new and varied extreme death metal varieties and this debut ARCHAEAEON showcases the band on full operational mode from the very initial opening “Chapter 11” on through to the 14-minute plus powerhouse “137 (Death’s Hedecaratia)” right down to the noise-ambient closer “Conclusion: Organum Exitus.” The band delivers a highly intellectual album based on the texts of Gnosticism and administers it all with a brash bravado of a seasoned extreme metal band that gracefully blends all its astute research of the metal universe into a cohesive whole of metal splendor. This band has risen quite high in my world and one listen to this complex behemoth of a debut should answer the question of why i have come to that conclusion. A brilliant beginning that was followed by the 2011 masterwork “Parasignosis.”