Control Denied - The Fragile Art of Existence (1999)

   After the last Death album Chuck Schuldiner finally had the chance to focus on his side project named Control Denied, that gave him an opportunity to keep merging into progressive metal between more melodic musical frames.
   Musically "The Fragile Art of Existence" sounds like the next step after Death's "Symbolic". Plenty of themes are sounding like to refer back to that album, while there are no signs of the needlessly overcomplicated frippery themes of "The Sound of Perseverance". The typical Mr. Schuldiner-styled themes and song compositions are waving back druring listening. The easily recognizable bass lines of Steve DiGiorgo also had important role to form the main charecteristics of the album, and of course to give another Death reference, in this case to "Individual Thought Patterns". The vocal style of Tim Aymer is able to make jelous any power or heavy metal singer, and definitely fits better to progressive ambitions than growling. The lyrical background is fortunately more serious than power/heavy metal lyrics used to be, and follows the almost philosophical approach of societal problems, that was the main feature of the late Death albums too. So even though Control Denied used to show something different than Mr. Schuldiner's main project, it became the part of the Death life work.