Metal Underground.com

The first truly surprising release of 2015, Alkaloid's debut album “The Malkuth Grimoire” creates a dark union between the technical and the progressive in entirely unexpected ways. If this album needs a sub-genre label, it should simply be called “dynamic death metal,” because these twelve tracks start with a base of everything that makes the various death metal styles work, but blasts them out in unique ways you aren't likely to hear anywhere else.

To give you an idea of what to expect, Alkaloid can be compared to a progressive extreme metal outfit like Enslaved (or perhaps long ago Opeth) colliding with an instrument-heavy and technical band like Blotted Science. In this case, however, tech metal gets a much-needed dose of the melodic along with a twist of Gothic atmosphere. It's still technical, but without the overbearing scale-playing that can really drag down your typical tech-death act (with the notable exception of the bass interlude track “C-Value Enigma,” which is exactly that, and perhaps purposefully so).

A vast sea of sounds flows back and forth across the disc from dark acoustic passages to jazzy guitar solos, but the band really knows when to shift gears and go much heavier and when to blend the opposing forces together. For icing on the cake, there's occasionally a touch of disturbing discordance along the lines of Dodecahedron or Deathspell Omega, like at the end of the title track.

“Cthulhu” slows everything down and goes into a odd mashup of bass groove and discordant, avant-garde black metal, while that middle to ending segment of “Alter Magnitudes” should absolutely be on a video game soundtrack. Things get more free form and bizarre with the four pack of “Dyson Sphere” tracks, adding in some Tesseract-style sound, but still keeping everything more on the extreme side.

Frankly, the metal labels of the world should be ashamed of themselves for falling asleep at the wheel and allowing “The Malkuth Grimoire” to be self-released. The album is unorthodox and constantly defies expectations, being solidly progressive but never letting go of the extreme sounds, and is quite varied but still all tied together musically and thematically. There's no question the album will land on the “Top 10 of 2015” metal list, and anyone into Obscura, Augury, Blotted Science, or Noneuclid should be grabbing this off Bandcamp immediately.