Music Review:Cryptopsy None So Vile

Ah yes, Cryptopsy from Montreal. I’m not sure I would put them on the same pedestal I would other French Canadian metal bands, but they are good. They have some serious competition up there in Canada because the original Voivod line-up was one of the best bands of all time, and Akitsa are a fairly incredible band.
This album was made in the 1994, the second album by Cryptopsy. I don’t strongly associate the 90’s with metal. Cobain killed himself in 1994, metal was mostly out of the spotlight. Some bands that had sold very well held on to their U.S. audiences. The thing with the black metals buring down the churches was during the early-mid 90’s but that wasn’t getting that much press in the United States that I can recall. Nine Inch Nails was a bigger deal where I was. I hadn’t heard of Cryptopsy until years later when I went to Montreal and saw that there was a whole big metal thing up there, I think that was when I heard about Cryptopsy for the first time. That was 2002. None So Vile is an album I like but is not an album I grew up with or new of when it was released.
Don’t pay money for this album. It is all available on YouTube. I wrote the same thing earlier today about Switchblade Symphony’s album Serpentine Gallery. Relative to the scrap of dung that is produced and labeled rock and roll and released to the public for consumption, those are two of the best albums ever made. Still, there is nothing about them so urgent that you need to even download them unto your own computer. There is something to be said for listening to the tracks on an album in the order that they were originally intended to be heard. The track listing is on Wikipedia.
Anyway, to describe accurately Cryptopsy. They are a hard, nasty death metal band from Quebec. At this point in the bands career they had a lunatic lead singer named Lord Worm who barely sounds human. The general consenus I’ve heard from metal people is that the better Cryptopsy albums have Lord Worm in them. Cryptopsy obviously had a lot going on in terms of technical skill evident in their ability to pound their instruments into submission at rapid speeds. The drummer in particular was a beast on this one. That and Lord Worm’s inhuman sounding vocals are the high points of the album. The weakness of the album is that individual songs would be difficult to discern from other songs. An exception to this would be the song “Phobophile”. because it features a very delicate piano opening.
I can’t say anything about the lyrical content because, of course I can’t make out the lyrics. Lord Worm would switch over from inhuman growling to high pitch screams with nothing resembling the human voice in-between. I am, however, very impressed that the final song on the album was entitled “Orgiastic Disembowelment”.