The band: Knife the Glitter. The album: Knife the Glitter. The listening experience: a riveting, challenging, exciting, satisfying, smart music geekout.

Mediocrity is your enemy when you’re making a full instrumental album, but Knife the Glitter stand triumphant over the bloody corpse of averageness. Even more impressive: they don’t achieve this win through absurdity and attention tricks, they do it with brain-teaser, layered displays of circuitous, unexpected, fascinating, wild, complex passages and measures. The only outlandish silliness is found in the band name song titles, which seems to be some sort of rule for high-level thinkers and their compositions (see Frank Zappa, Steve Vai). The drums and guitar deliver a controlled freneticism, anchored by solid bass on all of the tracks, accompanied by lovely guest jazzy keys in the middle of “Kid Colossal,” and edgy strings in “Permanent Baby Snowpants.”
Only during brief sections does the music echo Zappa, Vai, Satriani, Loomis, or any of the virtuosos from that niche, however; this is more of a modern fusion of Mathcore, Hardcore, and, well, Jazz Fusion.
If it helps you to grok their sound any further: guitarist Kevin Antreassian went on to join Dillinger Escape Plan. See, Knife the Glitter was a project undertaken by a couple of guys from NJ in the first decade of this century. Life and other commitments eventually got in the way, but the remaining 3 members never gave up on this material, and over the course of many years,got all of the tracks mixed and recorded. This wouldn’t sound like a blueprint for success, but it worked. Maybe the material was just that magical from the get-go, maybe it was the extra time the guys had to mull and think about their works in progress, maybe it was all of the extra time available for production. . . whatever it was, the end result is a phenomenal set of 9 heavy, complicated, interesting instrumentals with goofy inside-joke song titles.
This is never going to be a high-profile release, and it’s certainly not for everyone. In fact, it’s probably not for most people. It’s for a small, probably-bespectacled subset of the Metal audience - - you know who you are. If you have a taste for Metal that rewards your attention to its subtleties and intricacies, if you like Rush, Yes, Dillinger Escape Plan, Animals As Leaders, Gojira, Voivod, Dream Theater, etc, then I strongly encourage you to seek out Knife the Glitter. As of now, this is a one-and-done release, so this may be all we'll ever get.