Style: Avant-garde metal, progressive metal, black metal (Mixed vocals, mostly clean)
Recommended for fans of: Ulver, Borknagar, Voivod, Thy Catafalque
Country: Norway
Release date: 22 April 2002

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of Kristoffer Rygg, aka Garm, to the world of black metal: even from his musical entrance on Ulver’s Bergtatt, he postured himself as a forward thinker, integrating black metal with folk sensibilities in a way never quite seen before. One year later, Garm and co. dropped Kveldssanger, one of the first renowned dark folk pieces (and a contender for my all-time favorite album), all before taking a radical left turn into ambient and synthwave. But before Garm’s fascination with electronics and ambience, he also contributed vocals to progressive black metal outfit Borknagar, a renowned Subway favorite, and spent some time in Arcturus, one of the most avant-garde of Garm’s groups and the subject of today’s Lost in Time. Today, we’re discussing The Sham Mirrors, Arcturus’s magnum opus and my introduction to avant-garde metal as a young metalhead.

Touches of weirdness were always present in Arcturus’s sound: though their debut Aspera Hiems Symfonia stays fairly true to its raw black metal aesthetic, tracks like “The Bodkin and the Quietus,” “Wintry Grey,” and “Raudt og Svart” introducing bizarre backing clean vocals and a glacial, ethereal songwriting style betray the quirkiness at the heart of their sound. However, Arcturus quickly sidestepped their grim and frostbitten aesthetic in place of something with a touch more sideshow: follow-up La Masquerade Infernale was an avant-garde album so theatrical and so dramatic that it bordered on camp, foregoing the black metal of Aspera and squeezing every last drop of juice out of its stranger moments.

But which direction to go when you’ve emptied the well of cabaret theatrics? On The Sham Mirrors, The only logical answer for Arcturus is “both ways,” re-introducing the black metal that permeated Aspera (even including a feature from Ihsahn on “Radical Cut”) and at the same time launching the infernal masquerade into the bleakness of space: whereas Pagan’s Mind’s Celestial Entrance is a grand tale of shimmering auroras, cosmic deities, and warriors, The Sham Mirrors is considerably more stark and hostile, exposing the listener to unforgiving coldness, bursts of stellar radiation, and the sharp, jagged surfaces of lifeless celestial bodies who have never felt the wind weather their crags. The Sham Mirrors is littered with astral imagery and spacey atmospherics, from the desperate lyrical transmissions from an apocalyptic distant planet on opener “Kinetic” to the twinkling keyboard breakdown on “Collapse Generation” and the delicate piano work leading into extended synthesizer ambience in the middle third of closer “For To End Yet Again,” giving the listener a brief moment of tranquility among its austerity.

This is not to say that The Sham Mirrors is an actively hostile experience – despite the extrasolar anguish that permeates its runtime, moments of triumph and even cinematic songwriting surface throughout. “Kinetic” offers a great example, immediately opening the album with huge chords from guitarist Knut Valle, active and trippy drumwork from Hellhammer, and one of the biggest riffs on the album. Switching back and forth between spoken-word transmissions and vocals that border on yodeling, the track builds into powerful drumming that culminates in a ferocious guitar solo before petering out with delicate piano interplaying with a soft vocal delivery. Following track “Nightmare Heaven” works in similar fashion to “Kinetic,” making a grand opening statement by pitting an oscillating guitar riff against pummeling drums before transitioning into a breakneck piano solo by Steinar Johnsen. The track disintegrates into electronic drum/synthesizer interplay, rebuilding itself into something more metallic and mounting in tension until frantic synthesizers underlie falsetto shouts from Garm.

A cornerstone of The Sham Mirrors’ songwriting is its ability to coalesce bizarre song structures and unconventional instrumentation in a way that exudes flow. In the hands of more amaetur songwriters, the use of a drum and bass breakdown or quasi-yodels in the middle of a metal song would spell instant failure, but Arcturus thrive and succeed in these moments, whether it be the breakdown from frantic symphonic black metal into what is effectively the ice cave music from Donkey Kong 64 on “Collapse Generation,” the sudden trailing guitar riff into a brooding ambient section on “Ad Absurdum,” or the slap in the face by “For to End Yet Again” when heavy guitars and over-compressed vocals suddenly overtake subdued-yet-twisted sideshow instrumentals. Despite its oddity and foregoing of convention, The Sham Mirrors feels effortlessly written, as if this kind of songwriting is standard fare on whatever planet Arcturus are from.

Arcturus are fully aware of the silliness and camp that The Sham Mirrors is borne from: despite its pervasive themes of otherworldly suffering and outer isolation, it never takes itself too seriously, making a point to absolutely take the piss out of the music with the most non-sequitur word salad lyricism to be found in their career. The desperate outcries on “Kinetic” in lines like “As return is no option / Our eyes were removed / For our own safety / The distance too great / For you to hear our cries” and the lamentations on “Ad Absurdum” of “I’m tired of telling stories / With this ghost voice of mine / So you can say you don’t / Believe in ghosts” sit alongside lines like “Police, police, police / Please stop the Euro / From binar, bin Laden / Io, paramount pan / Io, paradox pan“ from “For to End Yet Again,” a drastic change in tone from morose to incomprehensible. However, like the quirky instrumentation and the oxymoronic songwriting, The Sham Mirrors never showboats its silliness, sneaking its way into the lyrics only to be found by those who listen hard enough to go, “What the fuck did Garm just say?”

At the heart of The Sham Mirrors’ success is its paradoxical beauty: it manages to balance the tragic and the cinematic with the absurd; it is at times as theatrical and campy as its predecessor and at others is effortlessly cool and even takes the piss out of itself; and it paints harsh and unforgiving alien worlds in a way that is approachable and listenable. Even though The Sham Mirrors was likely just a stepping stone on Garm’s path through musical experimentation, as Garm moved on from Arcturus a long time ago, it had a considerable effect on me and sparked my interest in avant-garde metal. Even as a young listener, I recognized its merit as a cool and weird metal album and after nearly a decade and a half of spinning, I am intimately familiar with its quirks and consider The Sham Mirrors an essential avant-garde metal listen.

Recommended Tracks: Kinetic, Radical Cut, For to End Yet Again, Nightmare Heaven
You may also like: Fjoergyn, Unexpect, Malariii, Frore 5 Four, Dreamslain

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page

Label: Ad Astra Enterprises

Arcturus is:
– Garm (vocals)
– Steiner Johnsen (keyboards)
– Knut Valle (guitars)
– Dag Gravem (bass)
– Hellhammer (drums)

The post Lost In Time: Arcturus – The Sham Mirrors appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Progressive metal, power metal (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Symphony X, Stratovarius, Queensryche, Dream Theater
Country: Norway
Release date: 18 November 2002

When it comes to communities as niche and underground as progressive metal, everyone has their “core memory” albums that shaped their tastes going forward and symbolize the transition from a casual fan to an obsessed hobbyist. Sure, I had spent a fair amount of time with Rush and then Dream Theater in high school, but for me Pagan’s Mind’s Celestial Entrance is the core memory progressive power metal album, remaining to this day a cornerstone, representing my gold standard of progressive power metal.

Taking bands like Symphony X and Conception as influences and teaming up with cheesy space fantasy inspired by Stargate, Celestial Entrance is not a masterpiece in groundbreaking originality or the avant-garde but unequivocally stands as a masterpiece of early 2000s power/prog execution. An evolution and overall improvement in virtually every facet from their 2000 debut, Infinity Divine, you can expect to find standard features of progressive power metal: guitar and synthesizer pyrotechnics, huge choruses delivered in a high register, and lopsided rhythms, all played at a satisfyingly diverse range of speeds and moods across its runtime.

What really separates Celestial Entrance from its peers, though, is its conviction: Pagan’s Mind fully sell the space fantasy theme in a way that is convincing, unafraid to have fun while doing it. Space-themed media can easily come across as sterile and impersonal, but through its delivery, Celestial Entrance ends up as an immersive piece that puts you as the protagonist of a grand galactic journey. The album is infectious in its fun and excitability: by the opening power chords of “Through Osiris’ Eyes,” I’m jumping around my room air guitaring and drumming as if it’s the first time I’m hearing it, and when the first verses of “Dreamscape Lucidity” come in, I’m belting the lyrics at the top of my lungs. It’s impossible to not have a blast when listening to this album.

Another boon of this album is the variety of songs: though they all stick to a similar sound, Pagan’s Mind manage to construct tracks varied in themes, ideas, and tempos. “Entrance: Stargate” and “Dimensions of Fire” gently glide across the night sky as an aurora borealis pulsates above and constellations glow down warmly on the listener; “Dreamscape Lucidity” and “Aegean Shores” are intense and triumphant adventures through mystical planes of existence; and the instrumental “Back to the Magic of Childhood” is a playful planetary exploration of a distant solar system.

All the elements that make this album great come together on the closer, “The Prophecy of Pleiades.” Controversial for aping elements from Dream Theater’s “Learning to Live,” “Prophecy” explores a range of moods and intensities, beginning with gentle atmospherics giving way to a slow guitar solo that builds into heavy chugs, like watching a meteorite that turns out to be a spaceship descending to the ground, creating a powerful gust as it gently lands. From there, it settles into a spacious instrumental section, giving the song room to breathe and giving the bass a moment to shine as it leads the song through a starry spruce forest. The guitars explode with energy before the simple and catchy chorus and pick up some tempo during the solo with lightning-fast guitar work giving into guitar-keyboard interplay where the guitar and keyboard playfully skate from star to star. The track concludes by returning to the slower tempos from the beginning and sending off the album with one last dramatic chorus, proving itself to be a masterclass of cheesy atmospheric progressive power metal.

Our Benevolent Subway Overlords sanction me only a few hundred words per review, so I’ll leave you with this: every moment contributes to the adventurous grandeur of Celestial Entrance, and is just as worthy of attention now as it was 22 years ago. As a 15 year old, I was completely won over by this album and almost 15 years later, I still love it just as much. I can’t effuse enough the amount of fun I have with this album, how it shaped my taste as a young fan of progressive metal, and how much joy this mountain of Moon Cheese has brought me.

Recommended tracks: Dreamscape Lucidity, Approaching/Through Osiris’ Eyes, The Prophecy of Pleiades, The Seven Sacred Promises
You may also like: Conception, Anubis Gate, Eidolon, Vanden Plas

Related links: Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Metal-Archives page

Label: Steamhammer – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Pagan’s Mind is:
– Nils K. Rue (vocals)
– Jørn Viggo Lofstad (guitars)
– Ronny Tegner (keyboards)
– Stian Kristoffersen (drums)
– Steinar Krokmo (bass)

The post Lost in Time: Pagan’s Mind – Celestial Entrance appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Progressive Metal (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Dream Theater, Ayreon, Kansas, Shadow Gallery
Review by: Sam
Country: Germany
Release date: 28 January, 2002

Chronological order is generally seen as the natural way of covering something, and usually I would agree with that sentiment, but sometimes I prefer the “whatever feels right in the moment” way of doing things. Once again, we’re doing Vanden Plas, and I’m still ignoring my upcoming Boss Blades and Ars Moriendi reviews. Anyway, I don’t have an elaborate narrative for this album and how it places within the band’s discography or within progressive metal history at large. Beyond Daylight slaps, and I’m here to tell you why.

The band’s previous album Far Off Grace was cool and all and got the band a lot of new fans with its straightforward approach, but for me it never did much besides the title track (please ignore the fact that I have listened to the album over 20 times according to last.fm). Beyond Daylight however, blew me away the moment I heard it. “Why are all these choruses so good? What’s with the dreamy folk atmosphere that’s everywhere all of a sudden? HOLY SOLOS SPANK ME DADDY!” OK, let’s wind that back a little shall we? 

But really, the solos are good. And so are the choruses. Like, unreal level good. Even the kinda boring ballad “Can You Hear Me” has an extremely catchy chorus. Christ 0 may have been balanced and spread its longer songs out evenly over the record, but here they just thought you know what? Let’s just make banger song after banger song and for the rest, who cares? They’ll be too busy eargasming over the melodic solos and ascending to a plane of sweet smelling (scarlet?) flowers over the atmosphere. Throw in some sweet riffs and great vocal lines and they won’t have the time to think about that other nonsense.

Like, just listen to “Scarlet Flower Fields”, or “End of All Days”, or literally any other of the first five songs. The atmosphere is wonderfully ethereal, the guitarwork is face melting, and the vocal melodies enthralling. And dude those transitions??? How is this even real. And again, THOSE SOLOS CALM DOWN STEPHAN, GUNTER; I NEED TO SLEEP. And then you think you can’t climax any further but “Free the Fire” opens the second half with a banging adrenaline rush. It’s the closest Vanden Plas has ever gotten to power metal with its high tempo and anthemic chorus. It grabs you by the balls in the best way possible. “Phoenix” is similar, but it adds more prog and atmosphere like in the first half to the mix. The title track takes everything the album’s done so far and uses it to create a wonderful journey through magical sonic landscapes. This one’s a little denser than the other songs on the album, but once it reveals itself it completely sucks you in its world and doesn’t let go. I highly recommend listening to it with the lyric sheet.

Compared to my other two reviews, this one’s a little short (and 200% more unhinged). But sometimes, that’s all you need. Beyond Daylight is a collection of extremely well-written songs coated in magical mushrooms and if you have any love for melodic prog metal LISTEN TO IT NOW OKAY TIME FOR BED WHY AM I WRITING THIS AT 3AM?! Oh yeah, there’s also a Kansas cover at the end that’s worth listening to I guess. WHATEVER JUST LISTEN TO THIS AAAAA BYE.

Recommended tracks: Scarlet Flower Fields, Free the Fire, Beyond Daylight
You may also like: Tanagra, Venus in Fear, Karma Rassa, Darkwater (bandcamp)

Related links: Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page

Label: InsideOut Music – Facebook | Official Website

Vanden Plas is:
– Andy Kuntz (vocals)
– Stephan Lill (guitars)
– Torsten Reichert (bass)
– Andres Lill (drums)
– Gunter Werno (keyboards)

The post Lost in Time: Vanden Plas – Beyond Daylight appeared first on The Progressive Subway.