Oppressor

Production: Relatively murky and flat but pretty decent for this style of music.

Review: Oppressor take a sound that is difficult to create and often done badly, the heavy and guttural American sound pioneered by bands such as Malevolent Creation and Suffocation, and convert it into the beginnings of a progressive sound unique to death metal without getting into either rock-n-roll silliness like Carcass or becoming a jazzfusion band like Pestilence or Cynic.

All instrumentals are well done, with a maximum of creativity and a reduction in the proliferation of instrumentation of space reduction. While these players are obviously early in the game of learning theory from their jazz and prog rock records, and thus while playing is excellent and conception attempts a great deal its experience is limited, holding it back only slightly in that within the death metal community, none of this falls flat and its ambition grants this band respect to experiment on future albums.

Heavy beat blasts and chugging riffs emerge throughout this album contiguously with song development, with an impressive range of performance and energy thrust into the alternately pummeling and driftingly harmonizing music. Connected in construction and comfortable in aesthetic rendering of concept, in a sense endemic to various breeds of scruff rock, but here the band bypass temptations of mainstream social and monetary power for an essential view into growth in the death metal scene at the time.