Oblivion – Called To Rise

“Called To Rise” is the debut album for the Bay Area band “Oblivion”. Playing technical death metal at its finest, the band has a lot of potential and musically is close to classic death metal bands like “Suffocation” and “Death” or more recent as “Origin” and other death metal pioneers.

The album is full of blasting death metal except the first and last song that are kind of an intro and outro and “Canon 1 In E Minor”, an instrumental blackish guitar song. The band itself refers to the music they play as blackened technical post-death metal, but you could just say that is death metal with a lot of progressive elements along with black metal type guitars and blackish scream vocals at some points.

All the band members are great musicians and everyone has his own unique story. Lead singer Dr. “Nick Vasallo” is a music professor and composer, “Ted O’Neill” is a 25 year veteran guitarist, bassist “Ben Orum” who was the founder and main songwriter of “All Shall Perish” that joined the band in 2012 along with guitarist “Victor Dods” who is completing his PhD in Math and “Luis Martinez”, a young drumming phenomenon. “Joe Ellis” (ex-All Shall Perish) has also contributed in the album playing extra guitar parts in some songs.

“Called To Rise” has great pace balancing between fast staccato parts with blastbeats, aggressive riffing and the more technical parts with arpeggios and stuff like that to slow and heavier parts of the album. To get your feet wet, you should listen to “Black Veils Of Justice” and “Reclamation” that were also made videos to promote the album, just to get a taste what “Oblivion” is all about.

Extra attention should be given to its production. The album sounds killer and was recorded and produced by “Nick Vassalo” and “Zack Ohren” that also took care of the mixing and mastering of the album. The downloadable version of “Called To Rise” has three extra songs, the instrumental version of “Black Veils Of Justice” and “Shred I: Multiverse” and “Shred II: Long Deaf Hate” that are actually played on string instruments blending metal with classical music that gives a different prospective and sounds extraordinary.

Oblivion is certainly a band that you have to keep in mind for the future as they released a fantastic debut album early this year that is nominated to become one of my favourite albums for 2013. Just listen to their music. I’m sure that if you are into tech death metal you will find them more than just interesting.