Like the Universe, Transcending Obscurity Records is expanding, delivering scores of very good to perfect releases, but I personally love the fresh new bands on their roster the most. Such is the French new sensation The Scalar Process with their debut album "Coagulated Matter" of progressive spacey psychedelic technical death metal which is perfect in execution and near perfect in design bringing such names as OPETH, VOIVOD, GOJIRA, MITHRAS, INANIMATE EXISTENCE, OBSCURA and latter DEATH to mind.

Mathieu Lefevre (vocals), Eloi Nicod (guitars, necessarily bass?) and Clément Denys (drums) have a unique vision: combine the tech death riff salad with eerie, hypnotic and utterly wonderful melodic passages in which they closely resemble FALLUJAH of which guitarist Scott Carstairs shreds the excellent "Ink Shadow", but the next track, "Celestial Existence" is even better introducing fast black metal blastbeats and accentuating this absolutely fantastic production seemingly handed down from heaven as seriously, I don’t remember the last time I heard such a wonderfully warm low end. "Poisoned Fruit" is the first perfect track, starting like a gore metal song but soon ushering pure atmospheric bliss, and I might as well let you in on a fact that from then on everything is just perfect all the way until the end (if you’re not counting the two instrumentals but more on that later) and the last song proper is like the biggest orgasm you have yet to have, with ebbs and flows, multiple latter DEATH riffs and melodies recalling the immortal "Symbolic" and the cascading guitars a’la "The Flesh And The Power It Holds", to say nothing of MARILLIONic keys, SWALLOW THE SUNny funeral doom and VOIVODic "Phobos" atmospherics and horizontal and vertical melodiscism. In a word: yummy.

Why not a 6? Firstly, while the three instrumentals: "Elevation" (no, nothing U2-ish about it), "Ouroboros" and especially the very DEPECHE MODErn closer "Somnambulation" are decent they could have been either made into one or made part of other tracks, but then again, I am not a big fan of separate instrumentals which seemingly serve no other purpose than artificially inflating the running time. Secondly, two tracks, the first track proper (after the monumental instrumental), "Cosmic Flow" and especially "Mirror Cognition" are creatively disappointing, with just riff salad and not much besides, but I chalk it up to the typical debut problems – an easy fix on subsequent releases.

Transcending, you guys really hit a goldmine with The Scalar Process and I am awaiting the next album with baited breath. Check it out if you like fresh breath in tech death.

https://www.thescalarprocess.com/