PSYOPUS — Ideas Of Reference (review)

PSYOPUS — Ideas Of Reference album cover Album · 2004 · Mathcore Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
siLLy puPPy
Well, what do we have here? This is mathcore metal at its most extreme. In fact I believe this is extreme metal's version of free jazz with Christopher Arp's wild frenzied manic guitar scales at a million miles an hour with Fred DeCoste's equally fast bass often backing it up with some kind of bop equivalent going on at times. Adam Frapolli's vocals are intense and as crazed as anything i've ever heard. Maybe this could be described as Meshuggah meets Elliot Sharp, Zeena Parkins and maybe Sun Ra with some Unexpect thrown in for good measure. It's just out there! Let's not leave out Greg Herman's drumming that is equally on par with the rest of the band changing jazzy drum rolls to blastbeats and back in the matter of nanoseconds. Whew! This is exhausting stuff.

Guitarist Christopher Arp demonstrates on “Death, I” and “Imogen's Puzzle” by slowing it down a bit that there is indeed some kind of jazz / metal fusion going on here. Whether these scales and chord progressions are made up or a hybrid of something is beyond me but there is definitely a pattern here and not just random noise. I am a warped individual and I actually like this as I am attracted to the furthest extremes that music has to offer. You know you got something wild if it makes Mr Bungle seem closer to Barbara Streisand than this! This kind of stuff is reserved for those special moods as I surely could not listen to this too often as it lacks diversity but as a short burst of extreme intense energy it delivers quite effectively.
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siLLy puPPy wrote:
more than 2 years ago
Guess i'm a freak. I guess the combination of loving ridiculously fast music like shredding and a taste for free jazz like John Zorn and the like are the perfect recipe for liking this. Please don't listen to it! If you're head explodes we can't keep reading all your awesome reviews :-p btw.... the first Coheed and Cambria is my equivalent. Listening to it makes me feel like i have fleas and tapeworms at the same time
UMUR wrote:
more than 2 years ago
I´ve tried listening to this stuff a couple of times, but it always feels like my head is going to explode. Upon conlusion I think they make terribly annoying music, that I can´t relate to in any way. And that happens very rarely to me. I usually find something redeeming about music I don´t particularly like, but this type of ultra technical mathcore really gets on my nerves...

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