The Interbeing – ‘Among The Amorphous’ (Review)
With summer finally upon us, people across the world are flocking to gyms and aiming to achieve the ultimate beach body. The big problem with gyms is the music; calling it crap would be an understatement. You can always listen to your own music on portable players and phones – but after a few workouts have gone by, even our favourite playlists and albums tend to sound stale as they soundtrack yet another hour spent pounding a treadmill into submission.
With Among The Amorphous, The Interbeing are about to unleash a solid solution to this problem.
Across ten tracks broken up by a mid-point interlude and topped off with an almost-90-second title track made up of glitchy electronics and distorted swells, The Interbeing offer much in the way of Meshuggah-indebted tech-metal mastery. It’s worth bearing in mind at this point that The Interbeing have supported Meshuggah live in the past – and spending time in close proximity with perhaps the most influential band in modern metal will naturally result in some more-direct-than-usual stylistic cross-pollination. It’s also worth bearing in mind that throughout Among The Amorphous, The Interbeing have shown themselves to be clearly wary of treading the clone-strewn path of pastiches and one-dimensional copycatting.
Fans of Devin Townsend, Slipknot, Fear Factory, and sharp-edged industrial textures will easily become enamoured with The Interbeing. Structurally speaking, Among The Amorphous’s songs don’t shatter the mould and fly off into unpredictable tangents every few seconds – but they do flow effectively and there are plenty of pace changes thrown in, thus preventing the kind of boring stagnation that comes with purely one-dimensional long-players.
All of this adds up to an album that is absolutely ideal for heavy-duty workout sessions. It’s three quarters of an hour long; you won’t need to skip a track and risk faceplanting your treadmill as you fiddle with your iPhone; and it’s also an ambitious and impressive concept album, providing you with plenty to think about. God knows the latter is especially important, given how dull the average exercise session can be.
Outside the nearest glorified torture chamber with a membership fee, Among The Amorphous is a face-deleting, eardrum-battering album worthy of a place in your music collection. But inside your local dumbbell-strewn dungeon, The Interbeing and their music really take on a life of their own.
LTK RATING: 85%
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