Miscreance Reminiscence Review

Miscreance

Reminiscence

Season of Mist

2026

Hailing from Northern Italy we have the tech thrash/death band Miscreance. This quartet has been honing their sound since 2018 and while it remains faithful to acts of the past, it pushes the very boundaries of the genre they occupy. The nine songs that make their second full length Reminiscence are a testament to that idea.

Let's get rolling on it, shall we?

Miscreance are hard to categorize as just merely “technical thrash/death”. There's more going on here than just that. Of course, we have the odd time signatures and busy, all over the fretboard riffs, the pulsing moving bass and tentacle-armed drumming, but they add a bit more atmosphere with ethereal clean vocal passages and spoken words from time to time as well. Couple that with some oddly jazz-infused clean guitar sections and unusual additional instrumentation like the berimbau, flute and digeridoo (provided by guest Leo Di Angilla) and this is pretty mind-altering material.

Another thing worth mentioning here is the excellent production, mixing, mastering and sound engineering of Marino De Angeli at Bridge Produzioni Audio in Susegana, Italy. The guitars (Andrea Granauro and Tommaso Cappelletti) are chunky and harsh but surprisingly articulate and pristinely played and never once muddy or overly distorted. The drums of Andrea Feltrin (who also serves as the vocalist) punch and cut through too, allowing us to hear every nuanced hit of the kit. Let me tell you, there's a lot of them and if this is what we get in a live setting, Feltrin is a properly multi-faceted beast. Behind it all is the perfectly pingy piano string bass fluidity of Jean-Claude Rossignol.

Miscreance write songs that while they have plenty of parts, jaw-dropping performances and wrecking ball heaviness (“Symbiosis”), are undeniably catchy and song oriented at the same time (“Vision”). Elsewhere, they let their chaos flag fly with mind-bending, off-kilter dissonance on the speedy but multi-tempoed “Scalp Ceremony” (complete with a flurry of bongos). The songs are never too long either, packing all of their wizardry into 3 to 5 minutes. Feltrin also has a perfect vocal delivery for this stuff, recalling prime Patrick Mameli (Pestilence) and Mark Grewe (Morgoth) and even hints of the godfather himself, Chuck Schuldiner. My absolute favorite track comes in “Synaptic Cortex Dissection”, that is a bit more melodic and has lead breaks and tapping sections that just have to be heard to be believed. Finally, if you have ever wondered what tribal, funky percussion would sound like, I would suggest the opener “Trait d’Union”.

Lastly, the band have offered up what all this madness is supposed to mean. It's cohesion is not an accident and according to them, they “uncovered a hidden world where jungle-dwelling hunters and digeridoo coexist with strange tongues, telepathic surgeries and a burning celestial corpse”. Lofty concepts for lofty songs, indeed. Reminiscence is a record that has to be experienced from front to back. This is some of the tightest, heaviest and forward-thinking thrash meets death metal since Cynic first began talking about Maya and the subsequent veil, and Atheist were pondering an unquestionable presence. Simply incredible, highly memorable and listenable…. Count me amongst their ever-growing legion of fans.

RIYL- Death, Atheist, Coroner, Cynic

~TB