Millennium is an appropriate name for this album given that it marks the end of an important milestone in Monstrosity’s career. This is the last album George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher did vocals for before moving onto Cannibal Corpse, where he resides to this day. Monstrosity was able to recover from this loss, fortunately, and still put out some killer albums in the ensuing years. That said, Millennium stands strong enough on its own to lament Monstrosity alongside other death metal greats in terms of its originality and intuitiveness.

The opening song, Fatal Millenium, showcases the band's technicality with a barrage of transitional shifts designed to overstimulate the senses. No moment is underutilized. Devious Instinct stands out in particular because it sounds exactly like the soon-to-be lineup of Cannibal Corpse to the point where it could have been slipped onto the Vile album and no one would have noticed. It's like a prelude of things to come. The rest of the album is a masterful blend of technical aggression that lays the groundwork for future bands like Spawn of Possession to explore even further later on. Even the slowest riffs on Millenium -- and there aren't many of them, this is quite a speedy album -- are still underscored by Lee Harrison’s (ex-drummer of Atheist and Malevolent Creation) scorchingly fast double bass, giving the album an overall feeling of never truly slowing down (the steady headbanger Fragments of Resolution being their only exception).

There are too many memorable moments to list. Too many unforeseeable transitions, too many moments of vocal, stringed and percussional greatness. Every song feels like it was handcrafted specifically to kick my ass. Slaves & Masters, for example, sounds like it could have been co-written by Chuck Schuldiner himself. Or, if you need a second comparison, it seems as though the same muse that inspired Suffocation's technical finesse hovered above Monstrosity for some time as well. My only gripe is that the sheer amount of guitar solos desensitized me to their individual uniqueness, but every song had to have a guitar solo on it in the 90s, and if this is the best complaint I can come up with, I think we are alright. This album accomplishes what other bands at the time were striving for (and usually failing to achieve) -- uniquely gripping songs that compel you to finish the album in a single listen. Highly recommended.