Russia’s Tardigrade Inferno released their debut Mastermind back in January, but I didn’t catch it until February. It hasn’t left my rotation since, and I love it just as much now as I did then. Hence, a Thing You Definitely Missed.
Mastermind is one odd duck. Put one way, this album is literally my personality written into a metal record. Put another way, it’s a circus-tent nightmare from clown hell, and Frontierer happened to play there once and left their chunky guitar tone there by accident. What sets Tardigrade Inferno apart from the only other act on the planet that I know of who sounds remotely like these Ruskies—Stolen Babies—is that their concoction of dark cabaret and metal is more straightforward and therefore way more fun. Cheesy? Hell-fucking-yeah. Yet, every microsecond of Mastermind claws deeper and deeper into my brain with every single riff or chorus or synth lead, of which there are multitudes.
Take the opening track, “All Tardigrades Go to Hell,” as the template for the album as a whole. Darya Pavlovich hosts The Greatest Show Under a Microscope with her sometimes sneering, sometimes quasi-operatic ringmastery. Maxim Belekhov and Alexander Pavlovich follow right behind with an elephantine riff that will stomp your skull flat. Keyboardist Viktor Posokhin further ensnares my imagination with eerie calliopes and buzzing synths, and drummer Andrew “Drew” [Last Name Redacted] provides a dynamic, albeit not at all technical, rhythmic backbone to support this colorful cannon of confetti and carnage. From: https://www.angrymetalguy.com/tardigrade-inferno-mastermind-things-you-might-have-missed-2019/
