Once Was Not

After 2000’s somewhat disappointing And Then You’ll Beg, Cryptopsy shed two members: founding guitarist Jon Levasseur and vocalist Mike DiSalvo. On Once Was Not, original frontman Lord Worm returns, and his entrance — a digitally altered, throat-ripping scream one minute into “In the Kingdom Where Everything Dies, the Sky is Mortal” — is genuinely thrilling, an inhuman howl of agony and desperation. Guitarist Alex Auburn, who joined on …Beg, proves himself capable of everything from air-strike riffing to dissonant squeals to Spanish-tinged interludes, and drummer Flo Mounier’s kit rattles like a collection of tuned plastic buckets, the seemingly impossible intricacy of his patterns matched only by the furious intensity of his playing. This album is like a whirlwind hurling railroad spikes in every direction at 1000 mph; all you can do is wince and duck and hope to still be standing when it’s over.