CRYPTIC SHIFT - Overspace & Supertime

The English band Cryptic Shift play extreme metal and progressive, with an unbridled passion for colossal compositions. The more curious among you will already know them from the intriguing “Visitations From Enceladus” from 2020, opened by the 26-minute, six-part suite “Moonbelt Immolator”. Their sci-fi inspiration, combined with an often dissonant, extremely technical style that never shies away from ultraviolent extremity, makes them palatable only to a brave minority raised on cerebral metal. In some respects, a track like “Planetary Hypnosis” puts them forward as one of the few credible heirs to Vektor, though that band started out from territory much closer to thrash-metal.
This second album, titled “Overspace & Supertime”, turns the ideas of their debut into an even more extreme, gargantuan exploration of technical, progressive, sci-fi metal.

Right from the opening “Cryogenically Frozen”, it's clear that jazz-metal carries more weight on this second album, with an obvious nod to Cynic. Across this nine-and-a-half-minute opener, though, there's room for ferocious thrash-metal attacks, devastating death-metal explosions, and refined instrumental excursions. It's a tour de force that pushes the musicians' skills to the limit.
This time the gargantuan track is “Stratocumulus Evergaol”, practically half an hour of sci-fi metal split into six parts. Its dissonant, unsettling opening, built on an asymmetrical, tension-laden fusion metal, rears up into supersonic outbursts and further slowdowns. The frequent shifts in tempo lead the track into a punk-thrash passage around the sixth minute, which turns into a monstrous, obsessive assault just a few minutes later. This volatile mixture clears up around the twelfth minute for a brief semi-acoustic interlude, before picking back up with a vengeance and finally exploding at the halfway mark of its thirty minutes. Once the momentum returns, a neon-lit thrash-metal emerges, with occasional brutal thrusts. A guitar apotheosis opens the final third of the suite, followed by slow-motion infernal fumes worthy of Khanate. After returning to a technical, colossal metal format, following yet another interlude, the track reaches its conclusion: a bombardment that fuses the dystopian feel of Meshuggah with the suffocating blend of Nile and the aesthetic of the never-praised-enough Voivod.

The shorter “Hyperspace Topography”, which still runs to almost ten minutes, is perhaps the true high point of the album: it combines the band's manic complexity with a more effective synthesis of brainy ferocity. It's an assortment of technical-metal kitsch spanning the Eighties to today, with feverish machine-gun drumming, instrumental duels, overwhelming walls of sound, and reckless, over-the-top outbursts at breakneck speed.
The ten minutes of “Hexagonal Eyes (Diverity Trepaphymphasyzm)” are instead more evocative, a galactic maelstrom out of which emerges a merciless thrash-death-metal, lightened by a fusion interlude and cacophonous, minimalist gashes.
As if that weren't enough, the closing track is also “Overspace & Supertime”, the album's second suite. It clocks in at 20 minutes and is more coherent and easier to follow than the over-the-top “Stratocumulus Evergaol”. Here the spatial, sci-fi element takes centre stage, complete with sounds worthy of vintage genre cinema, reverbs and psychedelic echoes, woven into their blend of metal extremities.

An album for initiates of extreme metal, “Overspace & Supertime” can be great fun if you accept its blatant excesses. It doesn't have the imaginative depth of an “Absolute Elsewhere”, nor the philosophical reach of a “Focus” or “Individual Thought Patterns“, but it is an orgy of impossible technical passages, sci-fi references and guitar riffs. It overdoes it, at times sacrificing overall compositional design for the love of shock value, of impossible variation, of the deranged solo. It could clearly have been shorter, but it would have lost some of its character in the process: an album that's oversized, starting with its title.

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09/09/2026