Outsider – Step to Nothing

Outsider was a death metal band from Lithuania that formed in 1990, shortly after the fall of communism. It then took them another seven years before they released their only full-length album, Step to Nothing. The cover art is pretty bizarre. It features a guy in a loincloth attached to a guitar neck crucifix. I have no idea what I'm going to get with this.

Needless to say, this is one of the strangest death metal albums I've ever heard. Let's start with the normal stuff first. The drums play your standard death metal fare, constantly offering up wave after wave of blast beats as well as a few mid-paced rhythms. They also play plenty of complex fills that sort of remind me of Human-era Death. The bass is rather prominent in the mix and plays in a rather unorthodox manner similar to Steve DiGiorgio. I swear, Darius's bass performance on this album almost reminds me of Individual Thought Patterns.

The vocals consist of your standard low-pitched death metal growl. It's nothing special, but their performance is still great nonetheless. The guitars are fantastic, though. They sound an awful lot like death. The frequently switch things up between fast shredding riffs and slow chugging riffs. I especially love those diabolical chugging riffs on “Alone”. Best of all are the solos. They are highly influenced by Death, which means they exhibit a great deal of technical ability without going so far as to rub it in your face. Sometimes they'll exhibit a great deal of melody, while other times they'll take on more of a middle eastern sound.

Now we get to the strange stuff. The first strange thing I noticed were the riffs near the end of “Death Song”. They sounded almost like folk music. Then there's the song “Peyote Visions”. It's really trippy. It begins with these warbly-sounding clean guitars accompanied by slow, jazzy drum beats. The electric riffs take on more of a doom/death structure. We then get some normal death metal for a while, but then we get an earful of some jazzy clean guitars accompanied by low-pitched clean vocals. On “Requiem”, the clean guitars take on more of a bluesy sound along with even more prominent bass. This song also features some great solos that remind me of Testament.

Step to Nothing is really strange and trippy. It's really hard for me to get my head around it, but for some inexplicable reason, I love it. I love how skilled these guys are with their instruments, and I especially love the guitar work. I guess the reason why Outsider broke up so soon was because the world just wasn't ready for death metal this crafty and unique.