Ever since CYNIC released "Focus," Progressive Death Metal has had two main types of bands. First, there are the DEATH rip-offs like CONTRARIAN and HORRENDOUS. Then there are the ones that took CYNIC's atmosphere and took it to levels they couldn't achieve (or didn't think to) back in the early 1990s. These are bands like EXIST and RIVERS OF NIHIL who added more atmosphere than CYNIC ever did to the mixture. TARGET, a band from Chile, is one of these bands.

Before I dig into this album, I want to be clear that I enjoy atmospheric Death Metal, but only when there's a fair balance of atmosphere and actual Death Metal. TARGET executes this well. Each song on this record has a nice blend of Death Metal and atmosphere with enough experimentation to tie everything together and make it interesting.

The album starts off with "Inverted Gloaming". This track flows effortlessly through each riff and sequence, featuring an interlude with clean vocals. The interlude transitions smoothly over time into the main Death Metal riffage. It's usually hard to recover from a clean interlude, but they managed to do so smoothly. The vocals and lyrical structures on this track, especially in the interlude, help make this song one of the highlights.

With songs all over the five-minute mark (with the exception of the intro, outro and interlude), the songs have plenty of room for experimentation, and they all take advantage of that. "Random Waves," my personal favorite track, runs at nine minutes. The song finishes with a very intense yet simplistic breakdown. It doesn't have a lot of depth or technicality, but the placement and structure of it make it very heavy and even capable of causing goosebumps.

"Surge Drift Moon" is another song with nice experimentation. Not only does it feature weird frog noises you'd hear in a swamp area in a video game that somehow fit into the music, but it also has a very dissonant and quirky guitar solo followed by clean vocals and a clean interlude. This gives the song a lot of character and memorability.

A lot of these songs have to do with water, and the band does not restrict this theme to just the lyrics. "Oceangrave" not only has amazing dissonance and depth, but there are also passages of watery atmosphere. It sounds lame when I say it, but it sounds epic coming through my headphones. "Blackwaters" also dabbles with this theme.

TARGET's second full-length is massive. It has a huge sound with plenty of experimentation with time signatures and motifs throughout. The production is strong, and it highlights the massive breakdowns of "Oceangrave" and "Random Waves". These guys have made themselves an album to reckon with, one that is as heavy as it is progressive and is as theatrical as it is oceanic. This album will crush you as if you were 2,000 feet underwater.