ALKALOID is the result of Hannes Grossmann departing from OBSCURA and joining up with Morean of DARK FORTRESS and NONEUCLID to create an OPETH-influenced Prog Death group. I was a bit hyped up about this record, seeing it recommended and praised in Facebook groups and such, and I also took a liking in most Prog Death I had the pleasure of encountering. So yeah, you could say my expectations for this one weren't of the lowest tiers. And, fortunately, they were (for the most part) fulfilled.

One of my biggest complaints about music is always how stuff just feels longer than it is, or should  feel. Especially nowadays, I get bored kinda easily by most songs and find myself skipping songs frequently on records. However, this problem thankfully was absent throughout "Liquid Anatomy", the 8 tracks the band offers all possess an internal consistency, as in I experienced around the same level of interest/enjoyment in the first, and the last minutes of each song. Not just that, but the songwriting itself felt really professional and conscious. There wasn't a sign of what bands usually do with their first albums, which is still finding their sound and not being entirely sure who they are as musicians and what they want to be (of course, that doesn't always make for a bad record). Although the compositions aren't perfect, they're almost always well-constructed. The only flaw from a songwriting-perspective is that all of the songs are based on having cleaner, quiter, sometimes even acoustic parts with more conventional Death Metal instrumentals. This idea isn't unheard of in the realms of Prog Death, but I felt that the band didn't execute this as well as their biggest (assumed by me) influencer for this record, OPETH. There's no "bridge" of some kind, that links the heavier parts with the lighter ones, it just... happens. The shift is unpredictable, but not in a good way, it came off as rather a "wait, what?" type of thing.

That about covers every praise or complaint I had with the disk, overall, I'd recommend it to both fans of the genre and people new to this kind of music.

Favourite songs: "Azagthoth", "In Turmoils Swirling Reaches", "Chaos Theory and Practice"