Death metal began in the Bay Area of northern California, then blossomed in Florida, before metastasizing worldwide. All of this kicked off in the late ’80s. What the Italian band Bedsore (I know, gross) asks us to consider is, What if death metal had actually started fifteen years before that, in Europe? Their astonishing second album blends crushing metal riffs with vintage organ and synth sounds, ethereally operatic and wordless female vocals, and ever-shifting time signatures to create something that crosses vintage Opeth with the dark art-rock of Van der Graaf Generator and Univers Zero, blends Goblin’s soundtracks to Dario Argento films with the short-attention-span thrash blasts of Mike Patton’s Fantômas, and calls back to an earlier landmark of jazzy, proggy extreme metal from Italy: Ephel Duath’s head-spinning 2003 masterpiece The Painter’s Palette. The album’s centerpiece, the nearly 12-minute “A Colossus, an Elephant, a Winged Horse; the Dragon Rendezvous,” adds the groans of a bowed upright bass and a surprisingly jazzy saxophone solo to the mix, as vocalists Stefano Allegretti and Jacopo Gianmaria Pepe bellow and wail in Italian. Other extreme metal bands have brought in elements of ’70s rock to good effect: Opeth, of course, and Blood Incantation, but also Chapel Of Disease and even Tribulation. Bedsore take their music farther out than any of those other groups, though, extending their compositions and their sonic palette to the point that it’s fair to ask if this is even a metal album anymore. But then they hit you with a track like “Realm of Eleuterillide” that’s wall to wall blast beats underneath the oozing synths, and you realize that they’re at such a creative peak on Dreaming The Strife For Love that genre distinctions are about the least important thing you could be thinking about at that moment.