UNIVERSALLY ESTRANGED specialize in sci-fi-drenched death metal of a most malign and mesmerizing order. The band’s public debut, Reared Up in Spectral Predation tells its story with its psychedelically vivid song titles. “Despoiling Souls of Flesh Across the Galaxy.” “A Thing, Oozing In.” “Sentient Meatsack.” “Teeming With That of Unknown Origin.” “Blistered Under the Blue Illusion.” Or, perhaps most vividly, the Technicolor eye-gouge of the album’s cover artwork itself. Still, all this is only half the story… With almost alarming fluidity, UNIVERSALLY ESTRANGED here create a sort of death metal that’s both cosmically levitational and grossly subterranean. Its throb is thunderous, literally earthquaking, but reveals reverberating echoes across space and time; the riffs are RIFFS, but also striker weirder and wilder than most Death Metal Riffs; an undercurrent of synths or synth-like sounds or not synths at all coil and uncoil and recoil and re-uncoil with a regularity that’s random and structured simultaneously; and the songwriting, as a whole, ably bridges down-tempo ooze and slipstream speed alike, with equal emphasis on mangling the mind and lodging deeply within it. Put another way, Reared Up in Spectral Predation is a portal to infinite possibilities, but also an end destination – too frightening and fantastic to behold. The only option is to don one’s best spacesuit and plunge right in…or upward.