Style: progressive rock, post-hardcore, math rock (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Eidola, Hail The Sun, Protest The Hero, Thrice
Country: Oregon, United States
Release date: 17 January 2025

Sometimes an album’s cover artwork alone is enough to fascinate you before you’ve even heard a note. In this case, what more is there to say than: frog. With cape. The fashionable amphibian dazzled the Progressive Subway writers from the moment he first appeared in our bookmarked albums, and the album which he fronts turns out to be almost as enigmatic as the figure himself. The lyrics throughout Object Unto Earth’s The Grim Village lean towards the abstract in a Rishloo-esque way, steeped in metaphor and built from tantalizing phrases made up of perfectly ordinary words whose slippery deeper meaning slithers away before you can get a grasp. Meanwhile, repeated mentions of frogs, crows, rats, and other beasts maintain a more grounded view of a forest community of intelligent animals.

The Grim Village features a unique guitar tone that defies any single descriptor, straddling the line between crunchy and fuzzy, combining the best parts of hard-edged post-hardcore, hazy psychedelia, and smooth, technical math rock. Individual tracks lean more in one direction or another, such as “On A Pale Horse I Thrive” which sets an aggressive post-hardcore tone early on, “Dreadful Lord of Toads” which maximizes the psychedelic elements, or the heavy post-metal overcast of “Onward With Blinding Speed” that opens the second half. These varied guitar features pair with a sharp vocal delivery reminiscent in part of Eidola, with also an echo of The Dear Hunter’s theatricality, and together these disparate components plot a map of the composer’s eclectic whims and whimsies as he leads the audience on a merry adventure through the woods.

The downside of all these different genre elements is that The Grim Village lacks a clear focal point or emotional center. At times edgy and hostile (“I Said I Wouldn’t but I Did”), at others dreamy and melancholy (“Alas, I Hop Along”), all these moods seem at odds with the overall aesthetic of Redwall-esque anthropomorphic forest creatures. As a further side effect, when certain tracks (like “Dreadful Lord of Toads” or the first half of “Sludge Crumpet”) let up on the forceful forward momentum and bring down the tempo, they tend to get lost in the milieu, not bound to the rest of the album by any obvious concept or even really by musical style. These drifting castaway moments divide the listener’s attention, robbing the more put-together climactic moments of some of their impact as the audience tries to piece together how we got from there to here. On the other hand, the nonconformity leaves room for unique little interludes like “For a Frogful of Dollars,” whose lively Western-film-inspired theme leaves me disappointed on every listen that it wasn’t developed into a complete song; a little more zest before the closing track might have helped carry through the momentum being built in the second half of The Grim Village.

Object Unto Earth founder Jonathan Zajdman offered some background behind the album’s development on their Instagram profile, saying “it became a love letter to being alive and being yourself, and how anything else is untenable and a waste of time.” He elaborated in a later post that the energy and creativity that drove The Grim Village’s creation arose from a nearly fatal car accident which he escaped with minimal injuries, saying that the creative process offered him a valuable form of catharsis after such emotional trauma. If I may read between the lines a little, that seems to also include the kind of existential emotional turmoil that follows a near-death experience. Although the surface-level concept expressed in the music itself has little to do with that fateful crash, the sense of catharsis comes through with full clarity; the final few tracks pull these themes out into full view in their lyrics. “Death is the Test of It” ends with the existential line ‘I died and I might and that’s okay,’ and “Bombina, Bombina!!” continues with its pseudo-chorus ‘Oblivion / You came a little bit too close / Now you’re here I′ve been struck by a fear / That I can′t outrun, outgrow, or face alone.’ These songs show the kind of radical acceptance needed in order to move on from such harrowing events, keeping their serious subject camouflaged by an upbeat and uptempo tone and emphasizing life’s little joys as a means of fending off mortality’s sudden proximity.

The Grim Village presents a peculiar collection of songs, some remarkable and some not so much, laying out their author’s inner thoughts with varying clarity and specificity and reflecting on the value of life’s experiences, even the most mundane ones. Like a woodland peddler, Object Unto Earth offer up an array of trinkets and baubles to catch the eyes of passing market-goers; some are little more than pretty polished river stones, but exotic treasures hide within, hinting at legends of their own. The eclectic styles and fantastical lyrics bring surprises at every turn, most of them exciting, but a few also a bit disappointing as the momentum spins out down a side trail. So come, join this caped croaker on an amble through the arbor, and maybe you can discover some existential dread along the way!

Recommended tracks: On A Pale Horse I Thrive; Onward With Blinding Speed; Death is the Test of It; Bombina, Bombina!!
You may also like: Vower, East of the Wall, Children of Nova, Anemera, Rosetta
Final verdict: 7/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Instagram

Label: Seven Sided Sounds – Instagram

Object Unto Earth is:
– Jonathan Zajdman (vocals)
– Eric Bloombaum (drums)
– Lucille (guitars)
– Emily Kinsey (bass)

The post Review: Object Unto Earth – The Grim Village appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: brutal death metal, progressive death metal, technical death metal (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Hate Eternal, Cattle Decapitation, Job for a Cowboy, Rivers of Nihil
Country: Oregon, United States
Release date: 26 January 2024

From the very first guitar driven musings of opener “Shame and its Afterbirth,” one gets the sense that Suffer & Become is an album that needed to be made, as though Vitriol and its frontman Kyle Rasmussen were a cyst taut with all the anger and anxieties of the modern age ready to burst at slightest prodding. From each track, wickedly technical riffage and densely metaphorical lyrics spew forth propelled by the sheer rage of Rasmussen’s guitar and vocal deliveries, the absolutely gravitational drum performance by Matt Kilner of Nithing and Inquisitous Deeds, and the hefty bass and backing vocals of Adam Roethlisberger. While the pure density of riffs across this album is quite unlike anything—the nearest comparison I can draw would be Hate Eternal if Erik Rutan took a nap in a rapid evolution chamber for a few thousand years—the album toes the fine line between intensity and incomprehensibility.

As its title suggests, Suffer & Become is as transcendent as it is brutal, and it is from that friction that some of the best moments on this album are born. The solos on tracks like “Shame and its Afterbirth” and the “The Isolating Lie of Learning Another” (Did I mention this album has the hardest track names?) are such moments where Rasmussen’s almost desperate style of lead work hits the listener like the dawn after a long night of contemplating suicide. Be it the neoclassical sweeping that closes out “Shame…” or the aching upper fretboard stabs that occur in “The Isolating Lie…” Rasmussen treats each chance at a solo as though it were his swan song. Even the more chaotic solos a la Kerry King have a propulsion that pushes hard and fast into the song’s next passage, a regular failing of shred based solos. I could prattle on about the lead work on this album for a very long time, but to put it shortly it is refreshing to hear leads so unique in a genre as convergent as technical death metal. Besides, the leadwork is not the only thing providing this album’s sublime qualities. Tracks like “Survival’s Careening Inertia” and “He Will Fight Savagely” (Again with those song titles!) both feature building song structures where the awe comes not from single elements but from the heft of the band operating as a whole, much in the same way that several tracks off of Rivers of Nihil’s Where Owls Know My Name operate.

Working in tandem with the instrumentals are the album’s lyrics. While Rasmussen and Roethlisberger enunciate just enough for me to catch the odd word or two, I had to follow along with the lyrics to get the full picture, and I am sure glad that I did. Those familiar with my review style know how little weight I often place on lyrics, so it takes something special to make me pay attention. That being said, every single line features a unique and vivid turn of phrase that I can’t help but ponder long after I stop listening. The track “Nursing from the Mother Wound” is particularly notable for this; I’ll never again view disdain as anything other than a “burdening mantle.”

Ultimately, Suffer & Become delivers the full package. The harmony between its themes, lyrics, and instrumentals, the gorgeous artwork, and clearly meticulous effort that went into its creation all combine to create what is without a doubt my favorite album of 2024, a true testament to the genre of death metal and of music as a whole as a cohesive art form. The theme of evolution through hardship is one often attempted in the metal genre, but never before has it been so fully realized so truthfully and vividly. Vitriol has crafted a work that truly challenges the artistic boundaries of technical death metal. In a genre often obsessed with complexity for its own sake, this is a rare reminder of the raw emotion and storytelling that make metal an enduring art form. A masterpiece like this doesn’t deserve to be missed—it demands to be heard.

Recommended tracks: Shame and its Afterbirth, The Isolating Lie of Learning Another
You may also like: Afterbirth, Hideous Divinity, Black Crown Initiate
Final verdict: 10/10

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

Label: Century Media Records – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Vitriol is:
– Adam Roethlisberger (bass, vocals)
– Kyle Rasmussen (guitars, vocals)
– Matt Kilner (drums)
– Stephen Ellis (guitars)

The post Review: Vitriol – Suffer & Become appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: psychedelic folk (mostly instrumental)
Recommended for fans of: Natural Snow Buildings, Lula Côrtes, The Gerogerigegege, Paul Konoplenko-Zaporozetz
Country: Ukraine/United States-OR
Release date: 25 October 2024

Over the past decade, Markov Soroka has progressed from a young Ukranian metal prodigy into a multi-project (Tchornobog, Aureole, Slow) titan of strange metal, showing Soroka clearly possesses a beautifully twisted imagination. I was lucky enough to catch Tchornobog at Soroka’s farewell show from his temporary residence in St. Louis, and nothing quite prepared me for the vomit ritual and blindfolded playing¹. They were a paragon of stage presence, and the live painting session—as in Soroka had a local artist create a work as the music played using the paint they vomited up—during the set only added to the genius charm. With that live performance scarred into my brain, I understand why he was commissioned to perform live at Eilish Gormley Art’s exhibit “Magic Mirror Magic Mirror Help! Get Me Out of Here”; Soroka’s aura and dedication to his craft (as well as his synesthesia playing a role in his unique creationary process) is fitting for the high art world even unattached from metal. That live set constitutes the second half of this weighty release, the first “commissioned” to commemorate a friend’s trip through the Balkans. These two commissions are starkly different from Soroka’s other works, so do they stand up to his metal genius?

The first half of the album, Kobza Bizarre’s Travel Loops of Static Broken Dialogues, guards the border of consciousness and unconsciousness. In its liminality, one can feel Soroka’s questing to reach his friend, trying to bypass boundaries of space and time. Each of the four tracks crests eleven minutes and once it finds its groove, never relents its pulsating, hypnotic grip. These are palates of musical texture for timbre and form more than traditional “songs,” unfurling contemplatively in order to allow the mind to explore vast internal soundscapes—seeking melodic or rhythmic variation would distract from the quest of stepping beyond temporal borders to the metaphorical Balkans. The long tracks will be frustratingly repetitive to most, but their unhurried dreaminess is gorgeous. To create these textures, Soroka focuses on a few instruments and tries to unlock the potential in what their simple repetitions can do: percussive bells, synths, and Ukrainian folk instruments like the double necked kobza and 55-string bandura. To get accustomed to the minimalist folk of twenty minute opener “NoClipping Sleepdreams of Abandoned Monastaries with Lovers’ Mothwings” is difficult and will require from most listeners a desire to achieve a meditative state, an openness to the flexibility of form which most music (even for prog metal fans) doesn’t challenge, yet its shamanic buildup is well worth it to the patient listener. The pulse is altered by backing synth melodies, occasionally the kobza and bandura pluck between the overwhelming onslaught of rhythm, and clipped voices take on hints of melody throughout. The other three tracks are similarly hypnotic and repetitive—although not identical in style as “Savehouse Spokiy Overlooks our Dreamsleep of Healthpoints” plays much more with a plodding dungeon synth-y backing—but the polyptych flows as one meditation in a satisfyingly brilliant manner.

What makes Soroka so unlike most other artists is surely informed by his monochromatic synesthesia: listening to music forms grandiose architectures and narratives in his mind. If you’ve followed along with the concepts of his Tchornobog and Aureole projects, this is an unsurprising revelation, but for those of you less familiar with his work: it is intensely story-driven and often more focused on texture than melody. This double LP pushes that to the extreme, though, and the lack of, well, anything except for hazy musical textures is confusing and difficult to grapple with, particularly for such an extended time. I’m sure Soroka’s amazing mind crafts a stunning artistic backdrop for this release, but me and my non-synesthete-ness get lost in the work far too easily. I still find it easy to drift away, but the piece is surely lacking the power it could have had I an extra sense. 

The side commissioned by Eilish Gormley’s, The Tzerkalocvyt Bandura of Kosmos, functions similarly to Kobza Bizarre’s Travel Loops of Static Broken Dialogues, albeit more actively. There’s a darker hue to the dreaminess, more sinister percussion (hear the second half of “Tzerkalocvyt I – Mountaintop Wind of Vaporware Downloads”). These tracks draw from a wider range of influence—particularly 90s PC game music and some gothic-ness—but I hear doom-y dungeon synth like Bakt and even some of the eerie folk music of Nishaiar infiltrate. The Tzerkalocvyt Bandura of Kosmos is as relaxing, beautiful, and strange as the first half.

Of course, paired together this release is over two hours of very repetitive psychedelic folk music, and it’s simply too much to stomach. It’s a lovely project to experience, letting the colors and forms and textures of the music wash over you, but it grows tedious quickly in nearly every listening context. While I appreciate tracks like “Tzerkalocvyt III – Narodivsya, 1995 Irregular Linedef” for the way it expands on themes in the previous Tzerkalocvyt movements, it wouldn’t exactly be great listening without a remarkably long attention span or with the genetic gift of synesthesia. Both his friend and Gormley undoubtedly hired the right person for the job, and Soroka is brilliant here, but it’s simply not a friendly album to listen to more than once in a blue moon.

Recommended tracks: The Tzerkalocvyt Bandura of Kosmos
You may also like: Nishaiar, Esoctrilihum, Bakt
Final verdict: 7.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: independent

Markovsoroka is:
– Markov Soroka (everything)

1.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcQUBlkXyo this is not the same performance, but Soroka does this live to start many Tchornobog concerts ︎

The post Review: Markovsoroka – Kobza Bizarre’s Travel Loops of Static Broken Dialogues & The Tzerkalocvyt Bandura of Kosmos appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: dissonant death metal, technical death metal, experimental death metal (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Gorguts, Car Bomb, Ulcerate
Country: United States-OR
Release date: 31 May 2024

We’re all united here by our love of prog, but there are many different paths to arrive at this grand convergence, and each path affects our current tastes underneath the wide progressive umbrella. Chris, for instance, liked basic bitch hard rock and buttmetal but then developed a functioning adult brain and craved more emotionally mature music; Cooper’s dad introduced him to the style, and he was drawn toward the challenges of playing and composing prog metal; Sam loves his online community of prog metal friends. For me, as soon as I entered the world, I knew I needed complexity, crazy solos, and long songs whose twists defied my expectations. That early desire for outright instrumental, as opposed to effete emotional, complexity is what instantly got me hooked on technical death metal, and Eden Through is the twisted musings of a malevolent tech death god. As I’m a reviewer with a predisposition for this, do Aseitas deliver?

Aseitas paint a sonic labyrinth for Eden Trough, a collage of ideas without stooping to postmodern unlistenability. The music sounds so warped it feels as if the quartet composed for the studio with strange splices, jumps, and timbres. I’ll listen along to a riff and suddenly the bottom drops out, a beat is skipped, or the complex layers of strings become inextricable; that half the album is played on a fretless guitar certainly increases the uncanny, impossible-to-follow factor, and the fiendish tricks of guitar playing, like the Car Bomb-esque pick-scraping and the little noodly parts in the latter stages of opener “Break the Neck of Every Beautiful Thing”, all sound stitched together from a god’s-eye view. What I mean is that the songwriting unfurls as angular and unfocused, but Aseitas simply have a deeper sense of the song’s flow than on a riff-to-riff basis. Although infinitely dense and always abstruse, the writing on Eden Trough comes together into a single cohesive piece, seemingly against all logic. They take microscopic chunks of other technical metal bands’ strengths—those Car Bomb absurdities, the tones of Lunar Chamber (“Tiamat”), the Meshuggah bottom-end rhythmic chugs, the seemingly edited onslaught of venomous vocals of Dodecahedron, the gnarly dissonant slams of Replicant, their own fretless guitars and songwriting weirdness—and painstakingly patch them together into complete songs which seem to be composed with more intentionality than even your average anal progressive band. Those comparisons are not to call Aseitas derivative, merely to underscore that you need not reinvent the wheel to be innovative in your niche. Because of all the quarreling yet cohesive elements, Eden Trough is exhausting from its density, but it’s incredibly successful with its focus on minutiae.

Therefore, it is praiseworthy that Eden Trough is a bite-sized length of thirty minutes. But every good is weighted with a bad, and the pacing is the true drawback of Eden Trough. The five tracks are split into two pairs by a clichéd Modernist classical interlude (“Null Adam/Null Eve”) replete with dissonant piano and eerie strings. It’s an enjoyable breather, but it feels oddly regressive creatively from Aseitas—I would expect the band to challenge the listener more, so “Null Adam/Null Eve” feels like a bit of a cop out with its “traditional avant-garde”-ness. Additionally, the pair of tracks after the midpoint—“Tiamat” and “Alabaster Bones”—are by far the best on the short album, leaving the first half of the album to fester a bit on repeated listens despite their strong qualities. 

Those back two tracks, though, shatter my expectations for Aseitas even with my love of their 2018 self-titled opus. Unlike mediocre dissonant death metal acts, Aseitas don’t forget to bring memorable riffs like the stupid polyrhythmic impossibilities at the start of “Alabaster Bones,” the slick riffs at 3:40 in “Tiamat,” and the crazy tempo shifts in the final minutes of the album. The band does things I still can’t really wrap my head around, too, like the weird little guitar trem run at 2:38 in “Tiamat” and the entire extended solo section from 6:00-8:00 in that track; the seamless transition to acoustic guitars after that is the cherry on top. 

My puny mortal brain is not cut out for technicality like this, and I love it. Eden Trough isn’t perfect—while the songwriting is intricately composed, I’m still a bit letdown they don’t stick with some of the more successful riffs for longer—but it does remind me of when I was wide-eyed and just stepping into the prog world for the first time: a sense of elusiveness and awe permeates Eden Trough.

Recommended tracks: Tiamat, Alabaster Bones
You may also like: Altarage, Replicant, Unsouling, Warforged, Lunar Chamber, Nightmarer, Convulsing
Final verdict: 7.5/10

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

Label: Total Dissonance Worship – Bandcamp | Facebook

Aseitas is:
– Nathan Nielson (vocals)
– Gage Dean (guitar, bass, vocals)
– Travis Forencich (guitar (fretless, acoustic, electric), piano, synth, field recordings, bass, vocals)
– Zach Rodrigues (drums, percussion)

The post Review: Aseitas – Eden Trough appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Genres: Mathcore, djent (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Car Bomb, Meshuggah, Frontierer
Country: UK/ Oregon, US
Release date: 15 March 2024

One of the only albums to truly put me on edge and feel uncomfortable is Pig Destroyer’s Prowler in the Yard. The music itself is horrific in its own right, but the text-to-speech voice that bookends the album truly put me on edge, especially the ending silence of closer ‘Piss Angel’, leaving you to contemplate the horror of what you just listened to . It’s one of the most bone-chilling moments in metal for me, and any band that can replicate that feeling have my immense respect.

So, Weston Super Maim kind of cheated by sampling this text-to-speech voice with the opener of See You Tomorrow Baby, but boy was it effective at getting my attention. The album wastes no time with a math-y assault on all senses right away. Within 3 and a half minutes, Weston Super Maim make it their mission statement to boggle your mind with time signature fuckery and a surprising shift into clean vocal melody about halfway through.

As much as I love getting my ass blasted by Car Bomb rhythms and Meshuggah chugs, the shift into an electronica-influenced and actually melodic section while still retaining the time-sig nonsense is what initially sold me on Weston Super Maim. My co-reviewer and possibly surrogate father Christopher (who recommended this to me because he knows of this band through some friends [Christopher: Yo, Tom, I found you guys through Andrea and Matt]), knew this would appeal to my affinity for music that annihilates the ears, but I didn’t think he knew just how much.

‘Autistic Kill Trance’, quite possibly song title of the year, jolts you back awake with Car Bomb laser pistol noises that lead straight into a crushing breakdown, punctuated by Blindfolded and Led to the Woods vocalist Stace Fifeld. This track lessened all fears that See You Tomorrow Baby had an ounce of formula to it, as it gives you but a moment to breathe before bludgeoning you over the head again, and ensures that you don’t get used to clean vocals or any kind of melodic breaks.

See You Tomorrow Baby fucking tears through its mere eight tracks in just shy of forty minutes, which is the sweet spot for an album this aggressive. Unlike Meshuggah, an obvious influence, Weston Super Maim make sure their transitions are as janky as possible. The changes are as jarring as they should be, and the production is just the right amount of suffocating to make sure some background melody still peaks through. Just as I began to grow weary, ‘Slow Hell’s ending bursts with keyboards and shiny, background synth melodies.

Obviously, this album isn’t going to appeal to everyone. A Car Bomb FFO is bound to turn some noses, and I can respect the cowardice. It takes a very special kind of braindead to enjoy a constant barrage of pummeling riffs and noises a guitar shouldn’t make, all as one especially angry man screams at you. In fact, Weston Super Maim themselves don’t even get it all right. ‘Johnny Mnemonic’’s constant rhythm took up too much of the song for the late guitar solo to save it, and ‘Brute Fact’ ends just as it begins to pick up. 

Thankfully, ‘The Bare Maximum’ picks up the quality right where it left off. This and the closer are easily my two favorite tracks, with the former having an absolute ripper of a solo by Soreption’s Ian Wayne. While closer ‘Perfect Meadows in Every Direction’ could’ve easily toppled under the eight-minute runtime, but the transition into melody that closes out the album was such a high note to go out on. Even with a backdrop of screamed vocals, the album perfectly ends with that blend of aggression and melody it started with. 

Since discovering this, I’ve gone back and listened to Weston Super Maim’s debut, and was shocked at the progress they’ve made in such a short time. These two lads have the talent to pull off true time signature wizardry, and even though still slightly rough around the edges, they’ve clearly put the work in to make an uncompromising, crushing vision. I really can’t wait another three years to see what Weston Super Maim does next, and how it’ll absolutely destroy my eardrums in the best way possible.

Recommended tracks: Autistic Kill Trance, The Bare Maximum, See You Tomorrow Baby, Pleasant Fields
You may also like: Ὁπλίτης, Frostbitt

Final verdict: 7.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Label: Independent

Weston Super Maim is:
– Seth Detrick (vocals)
– Tom Stevens (music)

The post Review: Weston Super Maim – See You Tomorrow Baby appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Sludge Metal, Prog Metal, Death Metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Mastodon, Voivod, High on Fire, Black Tusk, Baroness, Morbid Angel, Opeth
Country: United States, Oregon
Release date: 19 January 2024

The moniker Lord Dying was not chosen by the band simply because it fits neatly into the death-obsessed culture of metal, or at least if it was, they intend more than most to follow their brand through with an extensive thematic application. All of the band’s albums are about death, dying, succumbing, perishing, departing, disintegrating, and transcending – incorporating their name quite reliably into their lyrical themes. Starting their career as a run-of-the-mill deathy sludge metal band, Lord Dying’s first two albums more so represent the cruder depictions of death – illustrating images of skeletons, ghouls, and other decaying monstrosities. 

I, like many others, became a fan of theirs following the release of their third full-length album Mysterium Tremendum, alluding to the philosopher and proto-psychologist Rudolf Otto whose work is known for describing the phenomenology of death as a transcendent and unfathomable experience. This represents a shift in Lord Dying’s work to exemplify the more intellectual and “high-brow” depictions of death. Additional changes in the band’s musical style parallel this development as this is where they began incorporating classic progressive and heavy metal into their sound, resulting in a cult classic in the underground metal community.

They follow this stylistic progression, more or less, here with Clandestine Transcendence, however, this album is noticeably more eclectic with a “kitchen sink” kind of approach. If the listener takes the time to attend to the details, they’ll notice dissonant metal influences (“I Am Nothing, I am Everything”), funky sections (“Dancing on the Emptiness”), and psychedelic parts with theremin-like, flanging synth effects (“Final Push Into the Sun”). These additions sit uncomfortably in a crowd combined with the previous mix of progressive sludge metal, hard rock, and death metal that the band had previously fostered. This genre-wise variety has been widely celebrated among the reviews I’ve read so far, and as uncharacteristic as it is for me to say: I’m not sure this quite worked out in their favor.

To make a warranted comparison to Mastodon: If Lord Dying’s debut album is their Lifesblood, and Mysterium Tremendum is their Crack the Skye, Clandestine Transcendence would be like a disheveled version of Blood Mountain or even like Baroness’s Blue Album. Essentially, when compared to its predecessor, Clandestine Transcendence garners diversity while suffering major losses in cohesion and fluidity. This has a lot of tracks, thrown about haphazardly; it is seldom a good sign if you can shuffle the song positions on the album and there is no natural flow that is disrupted in the album’s chronological experience. 

In my view, one of the shining strengths of progressive rock and metal, as genres, comes from their given ability to experiment with song structures in a paradigm of limitless freedom, allowing them to deliver experiences of temporal complexity beyond that of normal music. However, this is best done when the songs are continuous, rather than discrete or choppy, and that is something that this album fails to deliver, especially when it sits next to Lord Dying’s previous work.

There are plenty of great tracks on this album, but for one reason or another, they get lost in the sauce. I think there are many catalysts to blame here for this issue, however, perhaps the most pressing concerns are the poor mix and production which deliver the great musicianship in a blur. With the guitar and bass reverb so loud and constant, the vocals and lead guitar riffs get buried a bit. Compare the clarity of the guitar solo at 0:51 in “A Bond Broken by Death” to the solo at 5:33 in “Severed Forever” from their previous work and the difference in quality is unmistakable.

Perhaps, this muddier approach was intentional. But in that case, having bogged down Clandestine Transcendence with extra repetitive verses and repeating noisy riffs makes this a less enjoyable listen, at least for me, someone who has never gone deep into the non-prog stoner metal rabbit hole. It may well be the case that these nitpicks are speaking for my ears only and these criticisms are of qualities par for the course for others. As it stands, this album came with a bit of a disappointment to me.

Recommended tracks: Final Push Into the Sun, The Universe is Weeping, Break in the Clouds (In the Dark of Our Minds), Dancing on the Emptiness, The Endless Road Home
You may also like: Howl, Black Royal, Bison, The Lion’s Daughter, Hammers of Misfortune, Anciients
Final verdict: 6/10

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

Label: MNRK Heavy Records – Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Lord Dying is:
– Chris Evans (guitar)
– Erik Olson (guitar, vocals)
– Alyssa Mocere (bass)
– Kevin Swartz (drums)

The post Review: Lord Dying – Clandestine Transcendence appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: avant-garde black metal, experimental ambient, drone, harsh noise, electronica (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Blut Aus Nord, Meshuggah, Merzbow
Review by: Andy
Country: United States-WA
Release date: 5 September 2023

Jute Gyte are the modern art of progressive metal, obscuring the boundaries of music so severely that several of my peers likely wouldn’t even consider the project listenable. But through violence Unus Mundus Patet strikes a delicate balance between metal and an axiomatic, Socratic form of music that at times is without really doing. For the uninitiated, Adam Kalmbach’s career as the wily genius behind Jute Gyte spans nearly two decades of constantly destroying conceptions of what metal is and can be, most notably through his inclusions of microtonality (quarter tones) and electronic noise elements. While the adventurous prog fan in me lives for this type of genuine innovation in the sphere I love, the normal person in me admits that Unus Mundus Patet–Jute Gyte at large–is uncompromisingly abstruse, but I love it for that.

Despite my philosophical ramblings, I also hate this record at points. Uncomfortably experimental music often translates much better to a theoretical framework rather than to good listening material. Positioned as the intro track, “Disinterment of Stanomoë” is like Cerberus sitting at the gates of Hades, a frightening gatekeeper of the descent into hell. Over an industrial drone, Kalmbach furiously picks perverse microtonal riffs that my virginal Western ears can’t seem to get used to. Besides the incessant blast beats, the buzzsaw guitars swarm and then sting like a swarm of bees or maybe like Reverorum ib Malacht. In this discordant industrial nonsense, though, the riffs contort in a freakishly alien fashion that is sure to excite the patient, pensive metalhead.

In addition to these hideous machinations present as early as the first track, Unus Mundus Patet contains many of Jute Gyte’s more recent electronica experiments on the breather tracks “Zweisiedler,” “Sema” and “Mere.” While these pauses from such dire metal are certainly necessary, I don’t find these three tracks compelling. Except for “Mere” with its eerie, undulating pulse that suddenly abandons the listener for silence, the electronica interludes don’t provide anything to heighten the experience of the metal: I want my electronica to be as fragmented as my metal. Speaking of fragmented, the main riff in “Only Castles Burn” is fucked. Warped beyond recognition, the main “melody” sounds tonally like the already out-there Kostnatêni if one heard Kostnatêni on a drug-fueled rager after days of sleepless partying. The track is utterly destabilizing, and yet that impossible riff paradoxically becomes the one thing I’m desperately latching onto as the rest becomes total noise. Jute Gyte’s compositional mastery is on full display in “Only Castles Burn.”

Like the solidly untenable, unrelenting songwriting, the production is full throttle at all times, but unlike the songwriting, it’s the album’s largest blemish. Puerile and cantankerous, the clashing, microtonal guitars eventually crawl under your skin and burrow to lay eggs. The drum production in particular is atrocious, the blast beats nearly overwhelming everything, leaving the vocals alone to spit venom into the background. This noisy, industrial production is what makes swaths of the album feel nearly unlistenable, everything drowned in a cacophony of reverb and grime. “Killing a Sword,” for example, takes an Omega Infinity-esque industrial section filtered by disturbed microtonality and then adds a fuzzed out noise that feels less painful to ignore than to absorb. These production problems are only compounded with the intimidating seventy-three minute runtime as focusing through difficult and abstract metal for anywhere near that long verges on painful. 

Fortunately, everything comes to a head after the silence concluding “Mere” with the gale-force of a hypercane that is “Hesperus Is Phosphorus.” Out of all the superlatives I can throw at this song, perhaps the most harrowing is scariest. This is the most downright terrifying metal song I’ve ever experienced, reminding me of the first time I heard the claustrophobia of Meshuggah’s I EP but expanded outward to a more universal horror. Blaring guitars and omnipresent percussive blasts wreak havoc on me like an unstoppable force of nature. The vocals are so buried underneath the mix they’re almost an illusion, but the slightest alteration in the sound among the unceasing, powerful drone is a relief, a reminder that the music still does something. Because besides the slight shifts in dynamic and occasional decomposed vocals, “Hesperus Is Phosphorus” is. Nothing changes; this is music stripped down to its fundamental axioms and spit back in the most savage, primordial way. This is music that transcends culture–transcends humanity–to simply vomit in the face of expectations. It’s as maddeningly repetitive as Plague Organ and as frightening texturally as Scarcity, yet it’s so profoundly minimalist. And at 4:45 the entire world that is “Hesperus Is Phosphorus” stops–this invincible force stops. This music that just is. Ceasing its being is the most electrifying, groundbreaking thing Jute Gyte could have done. And then the song proceeds as if the silence never happened. It’s an unspeakable, suffocating horror. It’s sublime, dangerous music. I genuinely believe that with Kalmbach’s pedigree, this is a masterfully composed noise piece and not just a lucky outcome of a prolific artist. My criticisms are merely about personal enjoyment, but Jute Gyte supersedes those–Unus Mundus Patet is as uncaring about what you think as its maker. 

Jute Gyte continue to push the ontological envelope of what music is in a way friendly to metalheads, and while Unus Mundus Patet is certainly overly long and often near unlistenable, its destabilizing nature ushers in a new way to hear music. I know this won’t ever appeal to the average person who’s casually listening to metal to briefly escape from the cubicle slog of corporate America, but for the people who seriously consider their most deeply held convictions about music, Jute Gyte are that theoretical philosophy in practice. Unus Mundus Patet again shatters what metal can be.

Recommended tracks: Only Castles Burning, Hesperus Is Phosphorus
You may also like: Scarcity, Kostnatêni, Yaeth, Stellar Descent, Plague Organ, Reverorum ib Malacht, The Mercury Tree, Omega Infinity
Final verdict: 6.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Metal-Archives page

Label: Jeshimoth Entertainment

Jute Gyte is:
– Adam Kalmbach (everything)

The post Review: Jute Gyte – Unus Mundus Patet appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Experimental Rock, Math Rock, Microtonal, Progressive Rock (Clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: black midi, weird King Crimson, Kayo Dot, Battles, Squid, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s microtonal albums I guess
Review by: Christopher
Country: US-OR
Release date: 7 September, 2023

What the heck is a microtone? So: most Western music you hear is conducted on a typical 12-notes-to-the-octave scale, made up of semitones (A, A#, B, C, C#, etc). But these notes aren’t immutable and frequencies exist between those notes; microtones can be accessed within the 12-note scale (e.g. by bending guitar strings), and we can divide the octave into a different number of notes to access microtonal intervals—we just don’t often do so because it sounds “out of tune” relative to the 12-note scale we’re all used to. It’s analogous to the colour spectrum: we think in terms of red, blue, yellow, etc, but there are finer gradations of colour to choose from, as anyone who’s swatched a bathroom will know.¹

With that foregrounding out the way, let’s commence: The Mercury Tree! This Oregonian experimental rock threepiece are veterans of the underground, their proclivity for unorthodox innovation having not exactly proved a recipe for mainstream recognition. On previous outing Spidermilk, the trio decided “our music is just too accessible” and so began to play with microtonality; sixth album Self Similar continues that experiment. On both releases, The Mercury Tree divide the octave into seventeen equal divisions² (which they further subdivide into thirty-four and sixty-eight notes). Atop strange time signatures and polyrhythms aplenty, the result is disorienting, dissonant music that presents an active challenge to the listener.

Right from the disorientating continuing ascents of “Grown Apart” you know you’re in for some Weird Shit. The eerie ambiences, off-kilter lead lines, haunting vocals, and crashing noisy sections are back in force and turned to a variety of ends: whether it’s the driving desert rock rhythm of “Stay the Corpse”, akin to Queens of the Stone Age if their physiognomy was being warped by eponymous Thing from The Thing; the counting challenge of “Dreamwalking” where echoing plucks cycle contrapuntally in and out of making intuitive sense; or the terrifying “Binary” which makes simple acoustic chords sound nightmarish before exploding into possibly the heaviest section on the album as the double bass pedal pounds away and Ben Spees screeches “BABY, BABY, BABY, BABY” in fire alarm falsetto. The Mercury Tree are back and they’re harder to describe than ever before.

And they’re joined by some veterans of the avant-garde world. Daimon Waitkus (Jack O’ The Clock) provides the surreal percussiveness of  hammered dulcimer, tongue drum and psaltery, as well as providing guest vocals, on “Recursed Images” and the powerful closer “After the Incident”. Both are proggy excursions through a variety of eerie soundscapes, from ghostly clanging to thick mathy riffage to bubbling keyboard-driven chaos to the unexpectedly beautiful melodies that soar over the usual chaos on the final track. Meanwhile, “Self Similar” features Gabriel Riccio (The Gabriel Construct) on lead vocals, whose deeper timbre is a pleasing switch-up before turning disconcerting when harmonising with Spees. The haunting vibe (more than usual) gives way to a short explosion of harsh vocals before becoming, somehow, more haunted in its vibes as pensive ambiences glide over an outré piccolo bass riff.

The main problem with any work like this will always be accessibility. I really like what I hear on Self Similar, which proves a consummate blend of the two strands of The Mercury Tree’s style, but this is a band who will always be more intellectually interesting than emotionally connective. If you love watching Adam Neely and Jacob Collier expound on music theory esoterica and analysing jazz music theory then you’ll likely be very open to what The Mercury Tree are selling, but for most listeners there’s something necessarily Brechtian about this willful experimentation; such an inherently intellectualised approach to music can be somewhat distancing to the lay listener. And yet sometimes The Mercury Tree hit upon a vein of sublime sonic surreality, and I feel like they’re accessing something more real within me than they did on Spidermilk. 

Self Similar builds smoothly and confidently upon Spidermilk’s tentative foundations, successfully marrying the xenharmonic zaniness with their wild, mathy songwriting style in order to create a musical puzzle box that will prove infinitely rewarding to those willing to invest the necessary time and open-mindedness to access it. This is The Mercury Tree’s weirdest album yet, but it might also be their best, seeing them refine a defiantly unconventional sound unlike anything you’ve heard before. That alone is more than enough reason to take a chance on them. Listen. Then listen again. They might just open up a whole new sonic dimension for you.

Recommended tracks: Grown Apart, Stay the Corpse, After the Incident
You may also like: similar experimental rock: Jack O’ The Clock, The Gabriel Construct, Nick Prol & the Proletarians, Ventifacts; microtonal metal: Kostnateni, Blut Aus Nord, Jute Gyte, Scarcity
Final verdict: 8/10 (9/10 if you love outlandishly experimental music)

1. I can’t talk theory all day, I’ve got a review to write (also I don’t know much about music theory). For more on microtonality, I found this video a helpful crash course ︎
2. Why 17 equal divisions of the octave? The Mercury Tree explain in this interview ︎

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Independent

The Mercury Tree is:
– Ben Spees (vocals, electric and acoustic guitar, keyboards)
– Connor Reilly (acoustic and electronic drums)
– Oliver Campbell (bass, voice)

The post Review: The Mercury Tree – Self Similar appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Experimental death metal, experimental black metal, experimental doom metal (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Spectral Voice, Blut Aus Nord, The Ruins of Beverast, Esoctrillium
Review by: Zach (Tchornobog) and Andy (Abyssal)
Country: US – OR and United Kingdom
Release date: 25 November, 2022

Zach:

You know what I never expected to see credited as an instrument on an album? Vomiting. Yeah, I thought The Vomiting Choir was just the cool name of a song. 

It’s not. 

Markov Soraka, the insane and possibly interdimensional being behind Tchornobog, has graced us with their presence once more nearly 5 years after their debut. After relative radio silence from Markov, who’s other projects seemed to be their areas of focus for quite a while now, I was content with not seeing a new Tchornobog album for a while. Markov was clearly busy scouring the desolate plains in search of a worthy tribute to the great Tchornobog, and that was gonna take a while considering how good their debut was. How I longed for another album that messed with the OSDM formula this much and had an atmosphere that felt truly eldritch. As it turns out, I would just have to wait a little while longer. 

The Vomiting Choir is Tchornobog’s longest, and it certainly scratches the itch that their debut gave me so long ago. In these 24 minutes, I was plunged straight back into the abyss, baptized in the filth that permeates every inch of a song with this kind of title. This thing moves forward with the force of the world’s largest slug, every riff vomiting (heh) forth straight from an abyssal (heh) blackness that only Tchornobog can conjure up. And yes, there is an actual vomiting choir on this song. 

The opening of this track tells you all you need to know. Yes, the saxophone is back and sounds as horrific as ever. And like the debut, it pulls you straight in right after listening to the sounds of a bunch of people vomiting for a minute or two. The Vomiting Choir is absolutely relentless, giving riff after riff before going into an extended doom metal section for the remainder of the song. Markov gets all their death metal urges out right at the beginning, and I think that’s the only place this track falls a little short. I wanted to hear a bit more death-y Tchornobog, but that just may be the bias talking. Overall, though, a worthy track that continues to cement Tchornobog as one of the best at their craft, whatever the hell they’re playing. 

Final verdict: 8/10

Andy:

…and I get the other half of the split! Abyssal’s previous album, A Beacon in the Husk, is a filthy yet supremely pensive take on death metal. G.D.C. of Abyssal clearly birthed Beacon during an existential nightmare, and dissonant, cavernous death metal melds into doomier and blackened segments all fighting for a stranglehold on your throat. The murky production feels like the dissolution of the ego as the album swallows the listener whole. In cacophonous, shifting walls of sound, Abyssal forged a unique identity as slightly more approachable than the angular harshness of Portal but less agreeable to normal ears than the dissonant, technical wizardry of Ulcerate. 

“Antechamber of the Wakeless Mind” extricates me from the appeal of Abyssal by drowning every instrument in more reverb than even Beacon did: This new deep dive into a less distinct, homogenized palette where everything melds into a singular drone dramatically takes away from their overall sound. Where in Abyssal’s albums of yesteryear, picking pieces of deconstructed melody out of the abyss was part of the appeal, now I just feel like I’m slowly getting soaked rather than struggling for my life against dark ocean water. I want thalassophobic dissonance to overwhelm me, not to inconvenience me from enjoying the minutiae of the final product.

The slow burning start is fine, though unspectacular; I don’t have a problem with funereal gurgles and long build-ups like some of my peers, but even the transition out of it into more urgent death metal is lackluster compared to what I’d hoped. Once we reach the more action-filled death metal, my enjoyment is similar to wearing wet socks. The production stifles anything and everything except for occasional lead guitar crescendos or solos like at 6:30 or 19:00. But apart from the momentary leads, the guitars and vocals were possibly recorded underwater; simultaneously, the drums were recorded somewhere next door–they feel detached. All intensity suffers by the production, and the disconcerting lack of excellent flow also takes away from much enjoyment. We have a classic case of lots of ideas haphazardly stitched together in a lengthy song that’s more bloated than it ought to be. When choral chants and lead guitars surface from the swampwater, I find the track to be an interesting experimental death metal opus on par with Tchornobog, but in the portions waiting between, I just want “Antechamber of the Wakeless Mind” to end. 

I’m glad my friend Zach enjoyed the Tchornobog side more than I liked Abyssal’s, but I miss the feeling of treading water in a stormy sea at night more than I like whatever this production does to this track.

Final verdict: 5/10

Recommended tracks: The Vomiting Choir
You may also like: Elysian Blaze, Altarage, Portal, Qrixkuor
Overall EP verdict: 6.5/10

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

Label: Profound Lore/Prophecy Productions

Abyssal is:
– G.D.C. (everything)
Tchornobog is:
– Markov Soroka (everything)

The post Review: Tchornobog/Abyssal – Tchornobog/Abyssal appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Gothic Rock, Prog Metal (clean vocals)
Review by: Sabrina
Country: US-OR
Release date: 3 September, 2021

I find it interesting that a band like Sculptured is so unknown, given that three of their lifetime members are also members of Agalloch. I mean, Agalloch is such a beloved band in metal that one would think that the attention would seep into their side projects; Khôrada for instance has gotten its fair share of fandom by proxy. One reason why many people may have forgotten about Sculptured is that they have not released an album in 13 years; as Agalloch gained critical acclaim, the band focused on that more and put Sculptured on the backburner. Sculptured‘s first three albums I will say, are quite good, revolving around progressive/avant-garde death metal which utilize some very atmospheric and artsy ideas. Each album has its own flavor of this style, but there was a clear sense of consistency and continuity; that is until The Liminal Phase dropped.

Opeth fans everywhere understand the consequences of going cold-turkey on progressive death metal, and the reception is never pretty. Likewise, The Liminal Phase came out of the woodwork with a really different kind of approach; now with a new drummer and vocalist, their style substantially changed into something that can be approximately described as prog metal with modern gothic rock tendencies. But as you will read, the complaints are not only limited to a change in style, but a drastic change in the mixing and production quality can leave many fans with a sour aftertaste. I do think that there is a lot of good, salvageable material that Sculptured has presented here for us. And in the right mood, some of the album’s strong points can begin to resonate with the listener, even with the obvious downfalls that are immediately present.

I want to point out that this album is thankfully only five songs, which show a level of restraint and maturity on the songwriters’ part. Major gripes and downfalls of albums are very often exacerbated by a lack of restraint of an album’s time length (this is something I am ironically also working on as a reviewer).

In this review, I am going to do something a bit different and address the downfalls of the album before the goods. Now, the most talked-about aspect in which Sculptured has apparently offended the ears of many is in its mix and production. I have even read one person say: “Genuinely one of the worst production jobs I’ve heard”, now, I wouldn’t go that far as I regularly find carelessly produced albums in the depths of Metal-Archives. Nonetheless, it is true that the way this album is mixed is questionable at best. The guitars are really low in the mix, and everything besides the vocals often just sound very compressed, then really vivid in other times. This makes a lot of otherwise adequate performances come off awkwardly. When one listens to this album you can’t really tell if a guitar solo is starting until it’s already halfway done, when you finally realize “Yep, looks like this is some sort of solo”.

With all of this in mind, I believe that this was probably intentional. Why is this? Well, firstly, you would think that musicians as experienced as the bassist and lead guitarist of Agalloch would know how to mix and produce an album. This is produced the way it is because it goes along well with the album’s theme. Really? Yes. Look at the album art. The way that the album art focuses well on a small circular section in the middle of a blurry messy fog; that ocular focus is very contingent, liminal even. The way the instruments are all compressed with the synths, bass, drums, and guitars occasionally peaking in and out of focus creates the liminal phases in the listening experience. I know that this might be me jumping to conclusions, but I think that this is a way of looking at this product in a way that makes sense as the album is about phases, opportunities passing by, and contingencies between shifting states.

Okay, so let’s assume that the mix is bad on purpose. So, why should we listen to this? I found that in the right environment, some of the peaks of this album can hit pretty well. The synths have this special shade of introspective depression that I have not heard in prog metal often. I can also say that the new vocalist is very good at creating a hypnotizing atmosphere as I have found myself being lulled by his voice, particularly on “Dead Wall Reveries”. The mixing decisions do hurt a lot of the instrumental performances, but there are some real peaks on this thing that hit hard when they do; including the gothic, almost post rock, interludes like on the title track. I think that when one gives this album a chance it can leave an impact as Sculptured knows how to write strong melodies, and often showcase fairly memorable songwriting.

From such elite-level musicians, this is a mixed bag, for sure (unintended pun). However, the bad parts are not so bad that they are unforgivable, and it has a lot to offer in the way of redeeming qualities that make the album last. I’d say that this even has enough unique qualities about it to say that it leaves an original impact on the scene (for better or worse). The Liminal Phase went out of its way to be something really different, even though for many people, it did not land. In the end, I appreciate the risks and creative thought process that went behind this album’s purpose and I might even find myself coming back to this from time to time, despite its muddy production decisions.

Recommended tracks: The Ordeal of Undecidability, Dead Wall Reveries
Recommended for fans of: Katatonia, Agalloch,Kayo Dot, Nightingale, Anathema
You may also like: Kontinuum, Havayoth, Vaura, Endless Chain
Final verdict: 6/10

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

Label: BMG Records – Wikipedia Page | Facebook | Twitter

Sculptured is:
– Marius Sjøli (lead vocals, guitars)
– Jason William Walton (bass)
– Don Anderson (guitars, backing vocals)
– Martti Hill (drums)
– Andy Winter (keyboard)

The post Review: Sculptured – The Liminal Phase appeared first on The Progressive Subway.