Sometimes you hear something – usually at a certain age – and it becomes the cornerstone of how you define something. Whenever I thought about my favorite kind of metal music, I always thought musically of Universe, the sophomore and final album by Canadian technical thrash band Dead Brain Cells, more commonly referred to as DBC. It was that aggressive, intricate and twisted guitar work that recalled a more diabolical Fates Warning, and even if my brain wasn’t focused on a particular song, it was focused on the overall vibe, the execution. This, my brain would say to no one in particular, was how I conceived of metal.

It’s funny to think that now, listening to the album more than 30 years after first hearing it played in the local record shop (Rock Fantasty in Middletown, NY). Funny because while I still very much like the album, when it came time to my own eventual musical output, it was any but technical thrash, owing more to hardcore and melodic black metal. So there’s what impressionable childhood came to define as my personal metal Jungian archetype, and there’s the music that naturally flowed through me (I say naturally, but technical limitations probably had a lot to do with it) when I attempted to create it. The divide is vast, but as someone once said we contain multitudes so I have no problem holding both ideas in my head. In my 50s I obviously have a broader view of how I define metal, but it’s fun to revisit the past and an album that had such an impact on me.

All this commentary and I haven’t even begun to talk about the actual music. I’m still years later trying to work through how I want this blog to work, and when I can I want to put more personal stuff in – it’s not like I write this for counts or revenue. So Universe: it’s a conceptual album charting the creation of said universe but also the trajectory of man and man’s limitations in the universe with a surprisingly optimistic ending. If I had to make a reference to another band, the closest would be Voivod – both bands have a very signature, progressive style. But DBC eschews some of the more psychedelic and noise/grind influences of early Voivod in favor of a very precise, technical thrash. Running at a tight 37 minutes, there’s not a lot of variation between the songs, but when every song is opening track “The Genesis Explosion” I’m okay with that. Bassist/vocalist Phil Dakin opts for more of a pinkish, hardcore bark in place of the normal screeching histrionics you would expect hearing about an album like Universe. It works against the shifting guitars and syncopated rhythms.

That first track really lays down what to expect, and tonally Universe stays in that gear through the demise of the dinosaurs in “Exist the Giants” and the dawn of humanity in “Rise of Man”. The guitar work is excellent, with Eddie Shahini and the sadly deceased Gerry Ouelette really laying down complex and interesting riffs. Ouelette’s solos are very much of the time, as is the dry and compressed production, but it all works for this very specific brand of thrash. Even the drum work of Jeff St. Louis (also sadly gone) shines through, sounding large and full as he makes heavy use of toms to flesh out the songs.

The more I listened to Universe over the week, the more impressed I come away with how compact it is; a concept album like this nowadays would be potentially triple the length and filled with bloat. And in its last two tracks – “Threshold” and “Infinite Universe” – the band really comes together in a fantastic conclusion. No hardcore to be found despite the very punk/hardcore name, this is still very much the music I envision when thinking about metal, and though I find myself going down very different paths now, there’s comfort and fun knowing this particular vein of childhood worship still works.