Century Media
2005
Once Was Not
About This Album
Cryptopsy's first studio album in five years, 2005's Once Was Not, is notable for reuniting main man and drum colossus Flo Mounier with original partner in crime and vocalist Lord Worm; in every other respect, it's pretty much a familiar exercise in the Canadian band's hyper-technical death metal. This, my friends, is a good thing. Not only because such a return to form will obvious thrill Cryptopsy's long-expectant original fanbase, but because, frankly, there's way too much melodic deathcore dominating the mid-2000s, and not enough worthy purveyors of complex, old-school brutality giving Nile and the also recently revived Suffocation a run for their money. This album does just that, and even though the musicianship involved is clearly as entertaining a factor in its discovery as anything else, the truly imaginative dynamic twists peppering most every track should not be overlooked. Among these, the most obvious examples include the unexpected snippets of first funky, then Spanish guitars inserted into "In the Kingdom Where Everything Dies, the Sky Is Mortal," the latter-day Atheist-reminiscent bossa nova swing preempting the otherwise inexorably explosive "Keeping the Cadaver Dogs at Bay," and the uniquely gentle interlude "The End.
Track List (try tracks 2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9)

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