Originally released in 2004 on France’s Deadsun Records under the band name Gorgasm, Willowtip Records decided to license this French group’s debut album Nerotripsicks and release it in North America with all new artwork and two bonus tracks. Not wanting to confuse fickle North American death metal fans, the group agreed to use the name Gorod for the North American release so they wouldn’t get mixed up with the brutal death metal act using the Gorgasm moniker on Unique Leader Records.

Personally, I think it’s best to not even try to cater to the intelligence of American death metal fans, because they don’t have any, and the band name should have just stayed the same, or, maybe just changed the name to Frogasm, but I digress.

Neurotripsicks is an ultra technical melodic death metal effort consisting of ten tracks of mind-numbing and awe-inspiring technical mastery. Immediate comparisons can be made to groups like Death, Cynic, Atheist, Gorguts, Theory In Practice, Anata and recent Willowtip artists including Necrophagist and Capharnaum with their amazing technical proficiency.

The riffing on this release is razor sharp with plenty of arpeggios, staccatos and elemenohpios. What? Don’t look so confused, L-M-N-O-P-os isn’t that witty a pun to get stuck on. See? I told you American death metal fans aren’t that smart and shouldn’t be catered to. Carrying on… the bass lines are equally impressive, often reminiscent of Alex Webster or Steve DiGiorgio in style, and the drumming of Sandrine is top notch.

The vocals definitely stand out as Voricious Gangrene’s Guillaume belts out in a deep raspy fashion and employs a vocal assault somewhat similar to Sylvain Houde of Kataklysm mixed with Glen Benton which often contrasts the melodic picking greatly, giving a greater feeling of depth to the music.

While the musicianship displayed is incredible, without being overstated, the song writing itself isn’t quite as strong as it’s obvious the group is limited on fresh creative ideas and tend to fall back on simply using tried and true concepts used by better bands 5-10 years ago as they borrow greatly at times from bands like Death and even more technical-oriented Cannibal Corpse.

By no means does their occasional lack of creativity make this album poor, the album as a whole is very solid and has all of the aspects to be great but it’s not amazing. There are moments throughout the album where I get caught up in the music and start to nod along to the rhythms and get lost in the music, and other times where I just start to nod off.

On the whole, this is definitely an album worthy of the money of any technical death metal fan, I’m just not quite entirely sold on whether I’ll still feel the urge to pick up this album and listen to it repeatedly 6 months or a year down the line, like I do with past Death, Gorguts and even Necrophagist albums. There are, however, the two bonus tracks on the album from previous releases and you can see how much the band has progressed over a five year span, which really makes me eager to hear how much they may improve in another 5 years. Promising.

Written By: Teufel