Miscreance – Reminiscence
Release Date: 28th August 2026
Label: Season of Mist
Bandcamp
Genre: Technical Death Metal, Technical Thrash.
FFO: Atheist, Vektor, Sadus, Coroner, Death, Defect Designer, Voivod.
Review By: Malte Brigge
Italy’s Miscreance threw their gloves in the tech arena with 2022’s Convergence, a twisted, knotty little thing that dazzled audiences and pleased the critics. It’s at once raw and visceral while being tight and technical, flying through tempo changes and shifts so abrupt you have to check the song didn’t skip. The guys in the band weren’t content just being another techthrashdeath band, though, so “through a collective hallucination” they took “a voyage through time” that “led [them] to discover a moment in human history that was lost” (according to the contact sheet). They came back with Reminiscence, or what they’re calling a “lost album…from an unknown civilization that’s both futuristic and extremely primitive.” Take that however you want.
Reminiscence takes Miscreance’s tech formula, listens to a lot of Voivod, adds a mad dash of Atheist weird, a spritz of Defect Designer ADHD and, just for the hell of it, kicks the vocal oddness up a notch or ten. Andrea Feltrin’s vocals are strange, landing somewhere between classic thrash barking, blackened rasping and a prisoner straining against his chains, maybe David DiSanto himself. Their your-mileage-may-vary quality may make or break this album for some people, but nothing else would make sense for these lyrics, some of which are in a made-up language that looks both alien and ancient, such as this verse from The Moaning Hill (or, actually, Vukìniwa: The Moaning Hill—every song has a secret, hidden title found only on the lyrics sheet):
Re ux sjn a’kiseh
Mtweri ot
Aquningu lon inebsyob
Yert suna jali
Yèrisjab
Jolt re sheki
Vukìniwa
It’s at once familiar and insane, but don’t worry! Miscreance has the music to match!
Tommaso Cappelletti and Andrea Granauro take their mercurial fretboarding to bizarre places on Reminiscence, circling around themes, maintaining unity, but making it impossible to pin down where they are or where they’re going. The album starts with clean, chorused chords against a frenetic bongo which leads into Trait d’Union’s hyper-sharp riffing that jumps and bounces all over the place but never loses its footing. The machine-gun triplets on Scalp Ceremony are saber sharp, and the dancing arpeggiated riffs of The Moaning Hill fly like a spaceship through an asteroid minefield too skillfully maneuvered to crash. We already knew these guys could lay down some pretty sweet solos, but that wasn’t good enough so they invested in extra whammy to trade off some of the wildest, weirdest soloing I’ve heard in ages. Not silly Slayer solos that sometimes accidentally make sense, but Vivaldi-esque musicianship that divebombs and screams and screeches and skids and does that weird little brrr thing Dragonforce likes to do. Every solo grabs my attention and I find myself saying, “What the fuck?” a lot when I listen to these songs. It’s like they heard the “The Thing That Should Not Be” solo and said, “that, but MOAR.” The more I listen, the more I love it.
Feltrin plays bonkers drums, flailing all over the kit across wacky time signatures and neck-snapping tempo shifts. He rolls hard, unafraid of good blast and skank beats, but also throws down chant-like grooves while adding jazzy accents all over the place that fucking rule (Oracle’s Rift). How he performs those piercing growls and that split-brained drumming live is something I’m eager to see, because it might prove he is an actual alien. Jean-Claude Rossignol keeps up on his thicc-as-fuck bass that’s mixed beautifully into the album, clear as a Mesolithic head-thumping and just as strong. What makes Reminiscence sound different to anything out there, though, is guest musician Leo Di Angilla’s varied additions of all kinds of percussion (bongos, water drums, who knows what else), digeridoos, flutes, and a berimbau, which give the album a tribal, ceremonial feeling even while the standard instruments create a Synaptic Cortex Dissection in your brain (listen to those amped, Maiden-on-meth guitar harmonies!)
Miscreance has fully arrived. If Convergence was their try-out, Reminiscence is the whole, unique show. These guys are flowing with ideas but also have the savvy that keeps ideas flowing. They write music that does as much to narrate their unifying themes as the strange lyrics do, and understand how to coalesce the songs into a meaningfully structured album that twists your head right off at the start but puts it back on for the more atmospheric second half. There’s a lot going on here; a dozen listens in and I’m still unpacking some of it, and if this keeps up, I’ll still be working on it come list time.
(4 / 5)
