BORN OF OSIRIS

Founded in 2003, BORN OF OSIRIS went through many early name changes, and we'll skip tallying the number of members—including, recently, longtime bassist David Darocha—who have come through this prog-core unit. These changes express the demanding creative body on the band itself to peak.

With drummer Cameron Losch the last original member, and new bassist, Nick Rossi, BORN OF OSIRIS 2019 is primed for high activity this year. Releasing not so much an EP as a mini-LP, the band's fifth release, "The Simulation", is BORN OF OSIRIS's shortest release since '"A Higher Place"' a decade ago. While some fans may balk at "The Simulation"'s blink of an eye running time, 25:40, fret not, there's another BORN OF OSIRIS release scheduled to drop this year. For this album's purposes, stealth proves mightier than content, even if a few songs sling gobs of meat in fell swoops.

"The Accursed" is a screamo-proto bouncer with huffing chords and purposefully stuffed with churning electronics. It posits the album's query over whether or not our society suffers from automata addiction. The more complex "Disconnectome", and later, "One Without the Other", is a blazing replication of BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME in half the latter's average time. BORN OF OSIRIS whizzes through metalcore, grind and black metal modes on "Disconnectome" in a mere 3:19. It achieves the same efficiency, giving far more attention to melody, at 3:10, on "Cycles of Tragedy".

Joe Buras's squelchy synthesizers squirming as a sub-harmony behind "Under the Gun", sound like they were hijacked from an EDM show, and the song itself drags upon its moody heels. Positively, "Under the Gun" contains a beautifully crafted bridge with Lee McKinney's frolicking guitar line, no doubt summoned from The Edge. Whether you're talking about this band, or the far more commercial WALK THE MOON, there's been a lot of U2 worship of late from today's generation of artists.

"Analogs in a Cell" and "Silence the Echo" show off all the respectable math metal chops this band has within the shadows of BEHOLD...THE ARCTOPUS. While "Silence the Echo" is the longest track on the album at 4:31, BORN OF OSIRIS proves that tight organization and attention to harmony have more value than seven minutes of crunky instrumental wanking.

Ronnie Canizaro, who has shredded his pipes in this band since 2006, continues to produce an appreciable lilt to his screaming, at times ringing of Wayne Static, though, as ever, he mostly mirrors Chester Bennington. His continued presence gives BORN OF OSIRIS an edge over its peers, who have gradually diminished, or at least taken extensive hiatuses from an exhaustive style of music that is not for the weak.