Wasn’t sure how Cryptic Shift were going to follow up their magnificent ‘Visitations From Enceladus’ LP, but they’ve somehow gone and topped it. Perfectly balancing prog wig-outs and ambient manoeuvring with laser-focused riffing, this Leeds quartet are brain-fryingly ambitious but also know how to condense all their big ideas down into satisfyingly headbangable songs.
The band have gone ever deeper into kaleidoscopic sci-fi storytelling and the songwriting follows suit, taking you on a wild trip that’s frequently dizzying but always subject to its own skewed logic. The meteor shower riffing straddles a fine line between death and thrash metal, harking back to the likes of Timeghoul, Nocturnus, Macabre and Watchtower as it tangles, coils and crushes. The jazzier moments, meanwhile, nod sagely toward the later work of Cynic: studious and considered, but at the same time expansive and all-encompassing.
In some ways it feels as though Cryptic Shift have been a victim of fate, time and circumstance, flung far off course by an unforeseen celestial anomaly. Both of their albums have, after all, followed in the wake of bona fide masterpieces by Blood Incantation, and because most people clearly only have the brainspace for one cosmically-inclined prog/death act, Cryptic Shift seem to have flown largely under the radar. This is not only a shame, but it’s also illogical and unwarranted: there’s stylistic and sonic variance enough that both bands operate in largely separate realms, and when their orbits do intersect they prove complementary rather than conflicting.