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 another part of the experiment, with some of the lines painstakingly constructed by hand.
It's an interesting direction for someone whose musical background already stretches across several projects, including ProgFox and Greedo Compressor. MacDonald isn't short of ideas, and his approach certainly doesn't suggest a musician content to spend the rest of his life polishing the same old technical-thrash formula. He has also been quite open about wanting to confuse the listener. That's an ambition I can understand, although confusing people and giving them something worth returning to aren't necessarily the same thing.
The obvious danger with this sort of music is that technical ability can take over everything else. A complicated passage might impress on paper, but what matters is what happens when the music is actually playing. Does a strange turn in the arrangement make you want to hear what comes next, or does it leave you wondering whether the song has lost its way? With MacDonald, that question seems particularly relevant, because he clearly has little interest in following the usual rules of songwriting.
His comments about production are worth noting, too. He has little patience for musicians who become obsessed with making everything sound perfectly sterile instead of concentrating on making heavy music that has some character. Coming from someone who spends so much time working with intricate arrangements and guitar details, that's an interesting position. Technical music doesn't have to sound like a laboratory exercise, and precision alone won't make a record memorable.
MacDonald's own working habits are almost as unusual as his musical ambitions. Five albums in one year is a serious amount of material, and he was already talking about more new music during the interview supplied for this release. He admits that promotion remains one of the things he struggles with, despite having spent years making music. There's a familiar problem there: putting records out is one thing, getting people to notice them is another.
Read Only Memory is aimed at listeners who don't need their metal served in predictable portions. The technical-thrash foundations are there, but MacDonald wants room for experimentation, electronic interference and the sort of left turns that can make a composition feel genuinely odd. Whether every idea works is something each listener will have to decide, but at least this isn't a project built around repeating a formula simply because it once worked for somebody else.
If Watchtower-style intricacy, Voivod's stranger impulses and Devin Townsend's more eccentric side are already part of your musical world, Spaceman deserves a closer look. MacDonald has no shortage of ideas, and he certainly isn't waiting for permission to follow them. The real challenge is making all that restless activity add up to something you'll remember after the final note.
https://spacemaspinebuster.bandcamp.com/album/read-only-memory
https://spaceman11.bandcamp.com/
Thanks to Grand Sounds PR for promo materials.
