Fleshgod Apocalypse - Agony (2011)

   By "Agony" Fleshgod Apocalypse made a confident step and  evidently determined their own style and sound as a symphonic technical death metal band. There have been some signs for that direction on their previous releases, but on this level it definitely wasn't expected.
   Their step was a completely relevant one that time according to the main tendencies of the extreme scene. Plenty of bands experimented to mix technical or progressive brutal death with other genres with more or less (usually less) success. And symphonic metal wasn't a new thing in general either, but on the side of brutal death it wasn't usual at all. Fleshgod Apocalypse however didn't compose together the metal and symphonic elements like how for instance Celestial Season did, they just paired the two by intensity and kind of let them run parallelly next to each other. The symphonic themes also creating strong atmosphere, and softening the effect of the brutal death noise and hammering. But in general these two main features could work independently without each other just fine. Symphonies used to create harmony, but in this case harmony they could include only by themselves. They're also not completing the technical brutal death themes, just increasing the chaos that they've created. This somehow reminds to the common accident in the casette tape era, when after reusing a tape by a poor copying method, it's previously copied sound material could be also heard parallelly with the lately copied music. This gave some unusual elegance to technical/brutal death, that normally couldn't be related to the subgenre on any level. However, due to the minimal connection, this combination proved to be successful, and the main audience discovered the new, yet unheard aspect of symphonic metal in Fleshgod Apocalypse's style.