Review by Tobias on November 28, 2001.

This disc is All-American Evil. Here’s a real life application for the seething madness that is Dragonlord; I was ready to hunt down someone from Seagate Software and hold a public execution, but thanks to Dragonlord’s all-out black fury, I managed to pass the day without decapitating anybody. See people, metal saves.

And Dragonlord will make you believe.

For those of you who aren’t on the “in” yet, Rapture is the debut album from the brainchild of Testament’s founding guitarist Eric Peterson. As one might expect, the guitars are an obliterating work that demands the listener’s astute attention, lest he be mowed over by it.

But the guitars aren’t the only thing that Eric excels at; for the first time, we get to hear the voice behind the blistered fingers. This is an outstandingly intense and surprisingly dynamic black-metal vocal performance that has a great earthy feel to it.

The dark-symphonic keyboards are mixed in very well, in fact, I can’t imagine it being done better than this. Not too much, and certainly not too little, their function ranges from creating the atmosphere to subtly freaking you out in a similar vein to Sigh or Mr. Bungle. But where those two bands cream you with the sound, Dragonlord uses it in a far less pronounced fashion.

These guys are pros; there is no getting around that. Everything is so well executed, it becomes a challenge to find faults. The driven and tight drumming will likely make you get up and start running without knowing why. I could buy this disc for the drumming alone on Judgement Failed and the title track.

As time goes on and metal gets older, it becomes more and more difficult to write lyrics that haven’t been done a thousand times over. Even the stigma of dark metal seems to dictate that you must have at least one song with the words “chaos” and “prophecy” in it. Is this a bad thing? I don’t know, it seems sort of a package deal, but it could be improved.

So who do they sound like? It’s not that easy to pin down, but one might say that if Dimmu, In Flames and Testament all hopped on an orgy train, their love-gravy would likely result in something almost as good as Dragonlord. If you send me an email asking who would be the preggy, my decapitation hiatus will be repealed.

Bottom Line: Prepare to get slashed and burned by some real American evil… so evil it’s almost sexy. This is one of the best releases this year… and it’s a debut, god save us.

Categorical Rating Breakdown

Musicianship: 9
Atmosphere: 10
Originality: 8
Production: 10
Overall: 9

Rating: 9.2 of 10

Review by Nathan on December 27, 2020.

I get that it’s easy to miss new cool sounds with the ridiculous amount of new bands forming and the information overload and tailored-recommendations-into-oblivion that the internet tends to provide, but even so, I like to think I still have a pretty good handle on what’s going on with extreme metal in my own province. Then a band like Fractal Generator comes along and just completely blows me the fuck away and makes me realize how little I know about the music. I mean, I would have expected something of this caliber from a region like Toronto or Montreal, but Sudbury, with a population of just 125,000? That just doesn’t happen. Not something that immerses me so immediately and keeps me hooked the whole way through several listens later. Hell, that’s rare for music to do to me in general!

After looking into the members behind this band, it seems the ringleader is Darren Favot, who appears to be some kind of secret extreme metal polymath. Besides being the sole constant in Fractal Generator, as he’s also the founding force behind atmospheric black metal project Finnr’s Cane, an amazing post-black band for those of you that like your Alcest and Lantlos. Both bands are very atmospheric, but that is all they have in common, and the means by which they achieve their otherworldly vibes are very different. Finnr’s Cane uses simplistic beauty and the space between notes to achieve the feelings it does, and Fractal Generator uses claustrophobic, guitar stuttering in a suffocating vacuum of production to create atmosphere through musical entropy. Warforged isn’t a terrible comparison, as they have a similar means of creating texture in the guitars, but the end result sounds more like the churning, clinical moments of Morbid Angel and Aeon with some of the modern sci-fi flourishes of artists like Blood Incantation and Artificial Brain. Influences aside, there’s something to these riffs that is completely their own - there’s a lot of melody added as a garnish, even though the album rarely relents with its hyper-precise pummeling. It overwhelms you, but it’s breathing, in, like, a fourth-dimensional way you can only fully understand on psychedelics.

Fractal Generator has a full-length out before this one, and while I’m still pissed I slept on this band until this year, I don’t think the first album would have grabbed me in the same way this did. I definitely would have been impressed by Apothosyntheosis, it’s still technical, distinct and gives the feeling of being trapped in a cosmic maelstrom, but the song structures don’t feel as complete and don’t flow as well. Macrocosmos, on the other hand, has trimmed some fat, smoothed out the transitions and focuses the songs more. Tracks don’t venture all over the place, instead using hints of black metal-tinged dissonance, cybernetic beeping and synthesized echoes to keep you captivated as the robotic drums and dry chugging grind you in their gears.

By fine-tuning their aesthetic, the album feels more complete from start to finish, with each song exploring a more specific theme or texture within the greater context of the album. They’ve toed the line perfectly between creating dense, heady guitarwork that sounds active and challenging to play, while still keeping a sense of groove intact that constantly drives the song forward and keeps it catchy. With Hate Eternal-inspired riffs that have a natural aversion to melody, that’s especially impressive, and in the past has only been done by Morbid Angel, Hate Eternal on their early stuff, and...that’s about it really. Fractal Generator has it all: a cool, unique vibe that draws you in right away, enough skill and diversity in the riffs to make you stay for the entire album, and just enough odd twists and turns to make you go ‘fuck, I wanna hear that again’. If this was released in 2020 it would have been a top-5 album of the year for me without issue, so I guess 2021 has an extremely strong front-runner on my year-end list right off the bat. Macrocosmos is never boring, and the band’s potential seems limitless right now.

Rating: 9 out of 10