Review by chrisc7249 on April 3, 2022.

Beyond Creation has always been an introductory technical death metal band for me. Whenever I'm talkin' music with someone and I tell them my favorite genre of music is technical death metal, and they ask for a band to listen to, I usually just smile and say "Beyond Creation." You'd be hard pressed to find a band that embodies the genre's description better than them. Sure, other bands are more classic and even better in some cases, but Beyond Creation has always stuck out to me as the zenith of technical death metal since 2010. Perhaps Obscura and The Faceless could be thrown up there too, but Beyond Creation is so insanely technical, progressive and death metal that they're always the first band to come to my head when I think of the latest tech death bands.

And so, what put them on the map is undoubtedly their 2011 debut, The Aura. Infinitely technical, the band's debut displays a vicious attack of death metal riffing mixed with one of the most notable bass performances in all of metal history. For tech death fiends such as myself, Dominic Lapointe is no unknown name; he spent time in various tech death acts such as Augury, Atheretic, and First Fragment both before and after his time in Beyond Creation. This guy can play; he's probably one of the best bass players in the world on a technicality level, and it certainly shows on this record. The bass is a fretless 6 string, and it's loud and spastic throughout almost the entirety of the album. It's excellently placed in every song and never feels overbearing despite the fact that it's seemingly always doing something separate from everyone else. This is certainly the driving factor that made this album such a classic for the genre.

But the rest going on along with the amazing bass is certainly not slouching either. Both guitar players are excellent as well, writing tremendous solos with a lot of feeling and some absolutely curb stomping riffs from time to time that keep the music together between sections. The drumming is tight, fast and holds everything together very well, making a base for all the noodling to do its thing. Riffage is definitely not low stock here, as there's plenty of classic death metal riffs that'll keep fans wanting something heavy around.

The vocals are the classic technical death metal vocals; brutal lows, deranged highs, mixed together. It's often overlooked how good Simon's vocals are on this album, probably because everyone associates him with his incredible songwriting skills, riffing and leads. Make no mistake, this guy can handle the mic just as well and writes perfect lyrics to go along with the feel of the music.

This review is pretty unnecessary, because almost every technical death metal fan has listened to this album. Still, I was surprised to see a score in the 70% range on Metal Archives, because I thought more people would love this and appreciate this for the classic in the genre that it is. Of course, I can see why someone might find this as forgettable, or too technical for its own good, but I find it to be very memorable and enjoyable, pretty much from beginning to end. A staple in technical death metal, this should forever be viewed as one of the genre's biggest stepping stones into getting where it is today.

FFO: Augury, Obscura, Quo Vadis

Favorite song: 'No Request For The Corrupted'

Rating: 9 out of 10

Review by Nathan on April 3, 2022.

To this day, I'm not entirely sure of my final verdict on whether or not I support or condemn technical death metal as a whole- sure, it blew my mind at first due to the unrelenting speed and just the amount of STUFF that was going on in the music, but as many quickly learn, there is such a thing as using restraint and not displaying the same tricks over and over again and a lot of bands playing in that vein tend to forget that. It's a genre that can be very easily fucked up and is difficult to play, not just in terms of instrumental skill but actually creating a worthwhile album as well. This little mini-review series is my way of sorting out my real opinion on tech-death by taking a look at a few bands on vastly different ends of the tech-death spectrum (it's a surprisingly diverse genre) and seeing why I like some and dislike others with some sort of sense of continuity throughout the reviews. Hopefully you like reading it as much as I liked writing it, and I promise outside of this paragraph I'll be as self-referential as little as I possibly can.

The single most important thing about writing a technical death metal album is this: don't force the speed and complexity. That's it. If you don't do that that's half the battle right there. Far too often the displays of incredibly dexterous and complicated musicianship seem to merely serve as a display of such and don't in any way attempt to be interesting or memorable. The lack of purposeless technicality is one of the main selling points here on The Aura. Previous recent reviewers have many complaints about the "constant noodling" on the album, but I could easily refer you to many bands off the top of my head in technical death metal today that are far more abundant in noodling sections (to be discussed in further reviews...) Beyond Creation is clearly a riff-based band first and foremost, a Quebecnical death metal band coming from a long line of Quebecnical bands from all over the map. Anything from riff heavy prog death like Augury and Neuraxis, deathcore a la Despised Icon and melodic death metal like Quo Vadis can be seen as influences on this album's overall flavor ('Coexistence' features some very groovy, midpaced and not particularly technical Quo Vadis-esque riffing for a majority of its runtime), but aesthetically the band this first brings to mind is Obscura, mostly due to the prominent bass (don't listen to the naysayers! The bass isn't annoying in the slightest and it's nice to at the very least hear it featured on a death metal album instead of being drowned out like it usually is, it does some interesting standalone things too.) and the actual presence of catchy, hooky melodies. I usually dislike a lot of this crap because it's unmemorable, and a lot of people seem to have hand-waved this album away under that assertion as well, but Beyond Creation have a melodic death metal edge assisted by the prominent bass makes for some pretty infectious riffs. The title track has some good ones and and if you don't think the main riffs of the shorter, punchier songs featured on the album ('Chromatic Horizon' and 'Le Detenteur') aren't damn catchy and memorable goddammit pay attention the next time around.

Yes, I understand this might blur past you quickly because there's a lot of riffs and they're widdly widdly and whatnot, but trust me, after a few listens it becomes a little more apparent that this is more just a melodic death metal album with a technical flair as opposed to vice versa. Usually after a few repeated listens the "wow that was fast" factor wears off and all that's left is a pile of uninteresting shit, but after it wears off is a pile of great melodic death metal riffs that sound like Augury and Quo Vadis songs covered by Obscura. Some parts are more interesting than others but they generally hit the mark more than they miss it, especially when they take a breather and just get in a groove for a bit. This really doesn't need the "progressive" tag though- honestly not everything with atypical song structures and clean bridges is progressive since that's pretty much order of the day for this kind of music anyways. This is pretty much straight up melodic tech death if you were to give it a pedantically specific genre tag.

The bitching about the lack of songwriting ability was downright perplexing for me because these guys are easily some of the more capable songwriters in modern technical death. There's tension built up and released in breakdowns, verse riffs are repeated at regular intervals throughout a song and bridges and similar-themed riffs string things together- the songs may be somewhat overloaded and complicated but they have a clear direction and purpose that gets across well if you're familiar with where they're coming from. The vocalist is kind of inconsequential, but guess what? That's the case most of the time with this style. He's competent and at the very least shows a fair range of styles without being actively irritating. He takes a backseat a lot of the time (not necessarily in the mix, though...), and there's other things worth paying attention to so it's no big deal in the end. They serve as a nice reminder, too. What genre is this supposed to be again? Death growls! Right. Death metal.

This appears to be a somewhat polarizing release, which is stupefying to say the least- It's not like this shit hasn't been pulled before by Augury and Obscura, and yet this is the album that creates the uproar? Okay. This is one of the few examples of the potential tech-death can have when it's done right, but it's nothing revolutionary- it takes a few interesting and minimally-exploited styles of death metal and presents them under a new banner. The Aura is worth your money, rumors of excessive noodling have been greatly exaggerated.

Rating: 7.9 out of 10