Ophidian I – Solvet Saecium (2012)

Hailing from Iceland, today we have the latest entry into the newly popular (again) world of Technical Death Metal. With “Solvet Secium” as their debut release, this Icelandic band sure has a solid statement to make through crazy guitar sections, hyper-fast drumming, and thunderous growls. For all of us that are not fed up with the countless Obscura, Necrophagist, Spawn of Possession, etc. replica bands that have popped out in the last few years, Ophidian I is a highly respectable entry into the genre.

Opening with a very Obscura-esque bass guitar wizardry on “Mark of an Obsidian”, the band’s musical journey begins with a very well balanced brutality-meets-technical-magic song. The growling is hellish and the furious drumming is just brutal as fuck. “Shedyet” keeps the magic rolling with an eerily familiar melodic section that any fan of Technical DM will recognize. This is one of the few problems with have with “Solvet Saecium”, while there are very cool and highly-technical section, there are also a lot of things that feel ripped off straight from Obscura and the previously mentioned bands, taking away from the band’s merit.

We understand that there is only a ‘finite’ way of arranging songs, but we are quite sure that Technical Death Metal is nowhere near finished with all of them, so we can’t really understand why bands can’t just craft their own songs instead of ‘borrowing’ a bit from others. Our favorite track in this release is the mostly original sounding “Ellipse”. The intensity of this song is excellent and the guitar work is quite well constructed and unique to Ophidian I since we didn’t have any déjà vu moments in this song.

Overall we have to say that Ophidian is a very gifted band in terms of technical abilities. However, they still need to work a bit more on their creativity and write songs that are unique to the band and not borrowing from all the other top bands of the genre. We surely recommend this debut release to any fan of the genre, and we will be keeping an eye out for their future release since they show great promise as a band.

Release: June 15th, 2012

Genre: Technical Death Metal

Country: Iceland