Review of Spaceman - Read Only Memory / Spinebuster Entertainment
Zach MacDonald doesn't seem particularly interested in making life easy for anyone listening to Spaceman. He describes his music as “crazy schizo alien technical thrash wacko metal”, which is hardly the sort of description you'd expect to find on a label's carefully prepared promo sheet. Then again, this is a guy who released five albums in 2025 alone, so apparently there's little point in asking him to slow down and play it safe. Read Only Memory is his latest trip into technical and progressive metal, with Watchtower, Voivod, Coroner, Realm and Toxik among the obvious reference points. The difference is that MacDonald isn't simply trying to recreate the sound of those bands. He wants to take things apart, throw in some unexpected elements and see what happens. For this album, he also explored darker electronic textures, drawing inspiration from XXX Atomic Toejam, an obscure project involving Meshuggah guitarist Fredrik Thordendal. Guitar harmonizers became anothe...
