OneMetal.com REVIEW:
Ion Dissonance – Cursed

The first time I heard Ion Dissonance‘s first album, Breathing Is Irrelevant, I was knocked on my ass. The band had managed to blend the breakneck aggression and velocity of the fastest, most seething grindcore with the finger-breaking technicality of the most head-spinning of the math-metal brigade – and they’d delivered said blend in a manner akin to a nail-bomb full of angular riffs devastating a city block. Suffice it to say, I was impressed.

The band fell off my radar somewhat after that – apparently, in the six years since my twenty-year-old ears were first ravaged by Breathing Is Irrelevant, the Canadian group has released some more albums, suffered some line-up shuffles, and shifted labels a time or two. It was when I heard that ID‘s latest album had been picked up by fast-rising, UK-based technical/progressive metal label Basick Records for European release that my interest was rekindled – that, and the fact that @demonpigeon over on Twitter kept on howling “WHAAAT DA FAAARRRK IS DA MATTA WID YOOOOUUUU” (a lyric from Cursed‘s fourth track, the teeth-rattlingly heavy ‘This Is The Last Time I Repeat Myself’) in tribute to the release. So, what’s it like?

Well, much like another recently-reviewed album, The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza‘s Danza III: The Series Of Unfortunate Events, Cursed is a celebration of the excesses of skull-pulverising heaviness that can be wrought by downtuned, 8-string guitars, roaring vocals, subsonic bass and drums that veer from epileptic firing-squad rapidity to measured, Thor’s hammer pounding on a dime. Ion Dissonance have clearly moved away from the breakneck tech-grind of their debut (although elements of it still remain, like in the blastbeat-heavy, 1:52 carpet bombing of ‘After Everything That’s Happened, What Did You Expect’) to a more deliberately crushing mode, without sacrificing any of their musical proficiency. Dissonant, minor-fifth shrieks, spidery scalular runs and twisting, schizophrenic structures find equal breathing room with breakdowns so heavy they could shift tectonic plates, the whole shebang underlined by a lethal groove that grounds the technical wizardry in a haven of primal lethality.

The technicality of the band isn’t in evidence so much in the riffage (although moments like ‘You People Are Messed Up”s frenetic tapping riffs and skittish leads show that guitarists Antoine Lussier and Sebastien Chaput more than know their way around their fretboard), but more in the seasickness-inducing unpredictably of the song structures and time signatures employed. Forget stop-start – this is stop-shudder-leap-dance-sprint-crawl-start, from beginning to end. As a result, much like the aforementioned Danza III album, Cursed can be one hell of an exhausting listen – there’s no let-up, no melody, and no quarter given. Easy listening, this ain’t. What it is, on the other hand, is an album of almost comical heaviness, delivered by frighteningly proficient musicians with lethal intent, wrapped in an appropriately hefty production.

Ion Dissonance’s MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/iondissonance
Basick Records’ Website: http://www.basickrecords.com

Bottom Line

Cursed is groovy enough to inspire frenzied headbanging, technical enough to make musos touch themselves, and heavy enough to shatter the earth's crust.