Exocrine glands are responsible for secreting stuff out through the skin. Sweat, mucus, saliva are all good examples of this, and Exocrine have produced a death metal album in the form of Legend that brings on at least two of those three bodily functions wholesale. The bulletstorm of Obscura-esque riffing brings on sweats from exertion, time after time the record blitzes the listener with more notes than the human brain can handle, whilst artfully placed breaks and resplendent song writing activates the saliva glands like a long-awaited meal.
There’s something for everyone here, jazzy parts for the prog heads, majestic leads for the melodeath crowd, there’s plenty of straight up riff worship for those that are a bit more old skool in their approach. There’s spades of modern technical mastery, sometimes the music comes that fast it evokes the speed demons of Archspire or Cytotoxin, there’s even a couple of nods to those heinous fucks over in the brutal death metal corner. If it is nothing else this record is a vastly diverse, dynamic crowd pleaser. The addition of industrial elements in tracks like ‘Dust in the Naught’ and alternate instruments in ‘Legend’ just further cement the labyrinthine compositions employed by Exocrine. This band does something that others tend to step aside from, denying the obvious and easy paths for the sake of the difficult, the daring and the desperately less trodden. People often say that controversy or at the very least conflict can create great works of art and Legend stands head and shoulders above others as proof of exactly this.
Sometimes technical death metal has a knack of being technical first and death metal second. These albums quickly stray off into the land of the ludicrous, where the note count and BPM of the tracks becomes the first priority and the riff becomes secondary to this. Exocrine have done just the opposite. Their overt worship at the altar of the riff has led them to produce a perfectly balanced album that straddles the line between insane musical proficiency and down right dirty death metal, that after all is the crux of the genre at large. They’ve made a career doing so, and long should it continue, sometimes technical death metal can feel stale, clinical and overly produced, Exocrine however prove that this doesn’t need to be the case, and they do so with extreme prejudice.