Animosity

Album: Animal
Label: Metal Blade
Release: October, 2 2007

When metal sounds like it’s on the verge of losing control, it usually affects the listener in strange ways. The listener may begin to thrash around, break things, or react with other acts of violence, forcing innocent onlookers to question his/her mental health. Please expect these reactions while listening to Animosity’s recent progress: it wears a mask of absolute fucking chaos. Leo Miller’s singing is the main contributing factor to this madness. His vocals overstep their expected timing regularly, doing a dance around the music.
Animal is the group’s follow-up to premiere album Shut It Down (2003). The crew, straight outta The Bay Area, are just over 20 years of age, and as with several of their contemporaries, musically advanced far beyond their years. Guitarists Frank Costa and Chase Fraser and bassist Evan Brewer bring a practically endless number of different cadences to each riff. Mastodon-like guitar runs might ring out for a second or two, a good example comes 54 seconds into the title, but they never fully indulge in that sound, always keeping it metal. So aggressive are the guitars when combined with Navene Koperwies’s drumming that the album’s multitude of stops may not register until the second listening.
This proof of technical ability itself may also come as a shock since the initial experience is, as aforementioned, that of total fucking chaos. Evangelicult, clocking in at 4 seconds, is a fucking ballad. The rising, tormented scream beginning the awesome: You Can’t Wait, stands out as a reminder that the fury of this album does not lessen. Animal has the complexity and precision of a machine, but the primal rage of an animal working on reptilian reflexes.