"The Folding Road" starts off with some maniacal blasting with some brief touches of Nintendo style 8 bit ambience, then jumps straight into some industrial metal style polyrhythms and beats. As always the synth bass hovers around in the background. We then get a brief space of synth and ambience which develops into a slow breakdown.My first thoughts are Genghis Tron have made a very obvious attempt to better meld elements of all the genres they play with. Instead of fairly disjointed passages jumping around everywhere, we have glimpses of electronics and ambience within riffing and blast beats. The songs themselves are more mature in their development, instead of being thrown together in a fairly adhoc fashion.
"Chapels" kicks in with a very extreme death/grind passage only to fall away into some electronic atmospherics, which builds up into a killer mid-paced break down. Synth keyboards match the guitar riffs as the distortion fades out signaling the end of the song. "From the Aisle" begins with an unhurried clean guitar riff and whispered lyrics while noise swirls around in the background. At around two minutes in this progresses to another slow hammering distorted passage which eventually dissipates into electronic noise.
The title track "Dead Mountain Mouth" thrashes through a series of math like licks and passages, spotted occasionally with blast beats or electronic ambience and some clean lyrics before bursting into a melodic crescendo of harmonizing guitars and synth. For the first part "White Walls" is a total s***fight of break beats, peculiar choruses, and melodic chords before turning a nice progressive breakdown into double bass induced madness. Everything soon dissipates into some electronic clap beats with some nice complementary clean guitarwork. "Badlands" takes the lead from white walls with some more electronic beats and ambience in a short interlude type track.
"Greek Beds" kicks and screams for a while before settle into a catchy little mid tempo guitar riff. Breaking down into a slower off-beat type passage, the song slowly progresses towards the end with some synth accompaniment to the guitar, underscored with a barrage of double bass. "Asleep on the Forest Floor" begins slowly and calmly, before settling into an effortless guitar riff, which rolls along slowly with much electronic ambient interference before becoming engulfed in wall of static. "Warm Woods" similarly is predominately a electronic track, with guitars coming and going continuously playing a similar riff as electronics jump around sporadically and progress into another crescendo.
Definitely a big change from the first album, not the concept, but the execution. Instead of being fairly ad-hoc and start/stop, these electronic elements are much more blended with the entire progression and structure of the song. The album is extremely more complicated, but in saying that, it is also less identifiably broad in terms of genre-hopping -as everything is far more cohesive. Most of the intense spastic s*** is crammed into the first four tracks - so some of the latter tracks were a bit of a letdown as I waited patiently to have my head blown off again.
That being said this is still a brilliant album, but it is so eclectic, so diverse and so eccentric, it' going to take me a long time to rationalize what I have heard. The main genres played with seem to be grind, death, hardcore, mathcore and of course a large suit of electronics. If you were intrigued by the debut EP, you will enjoy this. If you have more Agoraphobic Nosebleed or f*** I' Dead leanings, this will suit you too.