Eon Of Cycling Death is one of the finest death metal EPs in recent memory. Having escaped virtually all notice in the two years since its release, probably for reasons aligned more with insufficient promotion than any kind of intentional slight, Kever achieved a near-perfect cross-pollination of mostly everything good about old percussion-heavy death metal.

This is intricate, multi-part, multi-voice death metal modeled after several classic techniques. Power chords are used as a four-pronged strategem; as rapid-shifting shapes announcing the descent into quasi-grindcore sections (Suffocation), as primary, floating carriers of theme and dark melody embedded inside songs (Death), occasionally as tool of a tentative and fleeting breakdown (Cryptopsy), and finally, also in the way of punk-indebted movements of the earliest death metal from Sweden.

Information-dense to an extreme, like innovators Suffocation, motifs, such as they are, remain temporally and spatially restricted. Meaning, songs aren’t set up with any form of discernible premise at the outset; instead, “motifs” are discovered as songs unravel and then last for only as long as that pocket of time and melodic relevance exists within the song. The listener, at all other times, is confronted with a constantly mutating viral writing style that emulates the rhythmic, forward-driving, riff-salad intricacy of the Florida bands, and the love of lava guitar pyros patented by that sub-style’s spiritual godfather, Trey Azagthoth.

The latter is the will to motion, mentioned here at various times, and evident in great force on this EP, a relentless churning and restiveness of death metal spirit that pulls the listener along in its wake.