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DevolvedCalculated Biotek/Modern Music/Sony While the Fear Factory-meets-Meshuggah mechanical precision of the 2001 debut 'Technologies' was tempered by a compelling organic sensibility that left it slightly messy around the edges, Devolved have delivered 'Calculated' with a musical perfection so deliberate and purposeful as to result in a startlingly cold, accelerated sonic battery of an intensity few bands are able to capture on a recording. From the punishing opening track Biotics, 'Calculated' rarely lets up: flagellating riffs deployed in sharp bursts of clinical, percussive incisiveness mirror the staccato assault of the drums. Meanwhile, the vocals aggressively punctuate this rhythmic base, Nik Carpenter's barrage of hoarse barks providing one of the album's few tenuous links with the human world. Track after track, the Queensland tech metallers execute their music with the merciless flawlessness of an automaton. In this regard, 'Calculated' is absolutely relentless save for a few key moments where Devolved branch out to explore other moods and effects. The ruthless pace is slowed slightly with the immense, hypnotic semi-instrumental Catatonic Ruin which, bludgeoning and gentle by turns, offers a brief respite around the album's half-way point. Elsewhere, subtle samples and faint undercurrents of melody are used to add texture and depth to tracks otherwise straightfoward in their savagery (eg: Impute and Assimilate). Lyrically, the album further develops the humanity-vs-technology themes of 'Technologies.' This time the idea that humanity loses something of itself, both socially and spiritually, through its overdependence on technology is driven home with more strongly apocalyptic implications: for Devolved, rampant technological expansion has effectively set in motion the means for humanity's ultimate annihilation. And herein lies the paradox of Devolved's work: if this is music that serves as the cataclysmic soundtrack to humanity's inevitable self-destruction, then with 'Calculated', Devolved have heralded an entrancing and exhilarating apocalypse.  |
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