Sunday, February 11, 2018

Hieronymus Bosch - "The Human Abstract" [1995]

Artist: Hieronymus Bosch
Title: The Human Abstract
Genre: Progressive/Death Metal
Country: Russia
Release date: 1995

Track List:
  1. The Apogee
  2. Thought Racism Forms
  3. Petra Scandali
  4. Black Lake Blues
  5. The Human Abstract
  6. Mental Perfection
  7. The Gardens of Earthly Delights
  8. Doubt Soul
  9. Expectation of Autumn
  10. Near Death Experience
  11. Trust is a Dirt
This album is one of the very few really good metal albums made in Russia during the 1990s, along with "Eclectica" by End Zone and "Planeshift" by Rakoth. Hieronymus Bosch, formed in Moscow in 1993, were a kind of band that really deserved to stand in line with such classics of technical death metal as Sadist, Cynic, Atheist and Nocturnus, by this album alone. That's exactly what I'd call "IDM" as in "Intelligent Death Metal" :)

Surely it's very technical, but, fortunately, HB don't go too far with it, unlike many other progressive metal bands who are trying too hard to be "technical" making their music too complex to be memorable (Behold the Arctopus and Spiral Architect, in particular, are often criticised for that). This album was released on tape in 1995 and on CD (with two bonus tracks) in the mid-2005, and that was when I heard it for the first time when I was a university student. The band, after some lineup changes, released two more albums in the second part of 2000s, and ultimately split up in 2010. These two ones are very good as well, but the debut is still the best:

No comments:

Post a Comment