Deformity Adrift is a surprisingly warm Technical Death Metal album that borders on Industrial in its marching rhythms, as I hinted in my review of it. A lush rhythm section, courtesy of Brendan Sloan (Altars, Convulsing) on session bass and Paul Seidel (The Ocean Collective) on drums, made the music feel well paced and intricate. Like a slowly moving colossus, the music moved through Meshuggah-fuelled rhythms and palm mutes while building a dissonant atmosphere that looks to Ulcerate in the horizon. The concept that the band might want to re-engineer and partially re-record such a well realized album before it is even a year old is at once intriguing and baffling. Can the deformity go even more adrift? Reformed sports a new mix by the band, new vocals (including guest vocals by Brendon Sloan), a more natural drum mix and a wholly new sequence for the tracks, among other things. It’s apparent right from the start that Deformity Adrift: Reformed aims to be rawer; where the original left a smudged but cohesive impression like its album cover, this one too echoes its visual art in that some details are more clearly heard, spaced out. The dissonant lead guitars are harder to ignore as they cut through the mix much more, resembling the trope of a Dissonant Death Metal album rather than the unique sound of the original. The double kick of the drums similarly leave much more of an individual impression, begging for attention.
Among the changes, one of the biggest ones I can spot is the impression the album makes with this new track sequence. Much of the slower, Doom-like material has been moved to the middle of the album. Whereas Deformity Adrift moved at an even pace, perking up in energy with songs like “Suffering Beyond Death” and “Taufbefehl” in the middle, the latter sounds subdued and sapped of its energy on Reformed. These are two very distinct flows which changes up the impact of the songs. Which version you think is better will be up for preference, of course, and while I can see the benefits of a bit of a rawer sound in “Brutalist Imperator”, for instance, I am not wholly convinced that this makes the album better. The disparate elements of the music are now fighting each other for attention, diminishing the impact of the rhythmic content and making the songs more challenging to sit thorough. Rhythm and the dynamic yet colossally heavy feeling were Deformity Adrift‘s main strengths for me. This version sounds more like what a band would do if following the tropes of the genre. While it is an interesting exercise to see how much production choices can change an album, like the colors on an album cover, I cannot really recommend Deformity Adrift: Reformed to anyone but the most morbidly curious fans. This album grew one limb too many.
