Album Review: "Excluded" by Defecto

Excluded

During the excessively long four years of high school, many of us were doing something that was laborious.

How many times was the phrase this is the best time of your life spoken? Or it gets better?

For me, one of those statements is true and the other is a god damned lie and they  knew it!

I'll leave you to choose which one.

But what was high school? It was an effort, at least for me, to show everyone how cool you were. This same concept also came about with the rise of social media.

For many of us, trying to compete and show others how cool we were was really just showing how cool we were not. When someone tries too hard, their work and life, smack of effort, in a bad way.

Defecto

Enter the great Danes, Defecto.

They have clearly used a great deal of effort on this album.

The vocals are a full on range of metal and hard rock styles.

The keyboards are beautiful, creepy, and stunning, but all at different times.

The guitars.

There will never be enough ink spilled on how cool these guitars are. The guitar tracks on this record will shake your room so much that the record will skip.

Crushing solos, beautiful melodies, and progressive songwriting, but of course that belongs to everyone in the quartet doesn't it?

Even the spider in the back has the ability to mix it up. A nice little riff chugs along and out come the double bass cannons. It's just amazing.

What sets Defecto apart from other highly accomplished prog metal bands is their ability to create cohesiveness while making it seem like they're not trying at all.

Metal  has had a wide swath of progressive artists going all the way back to Black Sabbath. The best of the best never seemed like they were prog, but were just writing songs as they made sense, Metallica, Black Sabbath, Eye of Solitude, and Iron Maiden.

No one ever called these bands prog-metal, because it never felt they were trying to paste the mariachi part onto the brutal death metal blast beat part.

That's why Defecto is so amazing. It never feels like they're trying. They're just doing.

Release: 3/18/16
Genre: Progressive Metal
Label: Elevation
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