Style: progressive death metal, melodic death metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Alkaloid, Opeth, Blood Incantation, Persefone
Country: Michigan, United States
Release date: 13 June 2025

You see the over-saturated artwork and read the utterly inane band name. You think to yourself, “Here we go with another over-ambitious sci-fi themed zany djent solo-project.” Oh how wrong you are. The Biscuit Merchant isn’t a djent band but rather a one-man prog death project from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Tempora marks his tenth full-length release since debuting in 2017. From the name to the spacefaring artwork, there’s an air of tongue-in-cheek ambition, but beneath the surface is a sincere and sprawling attempt at progressive death metal.

Despite being most easily categorized as progressive (and melodic) death metal, the fusion of genres that The Biscuit Merchant utilizes on Tempora feels a lot more like a tour of the metal scene at large. For every head-bang inducing chugger of a riff (“Victorious” and “Tempora”) there’s a galloping, power-metal tinged melody (“Kill Time” and “Amidakuji”) or a wah-laden, classic rock infused solo (“Uncommon Enemies” and “Judgement Day”). The eclectic fusion of genres ends up sounding something like Alkaloid meets Xoth meets Opeth, but the gravitational force holding Tempora’s disparate influences together is its vocal performance. Both clean and harsh, the vocals give each track a catchy edge that goes great lengths in making the album feel cohesive, despite never employing any overtly technical or flashy techniques. Unfortunately, for as much effort as the vocals put towards making the album’s vast scope cohesive, the song structures do the opposite.

The eight tracks that make up Tempora fall into two categories: those that roughly follow a traditional song structure and those that don’t. My issue lies with the latter. Tracks like “Kill Time” and “Celestial Awakening” each make use of a through-composed structure that falls apart in the songs’ back halves. Riffs are thrown at the listener, and not one seems to follow logically from what came before or flow smoothly into what comes after. This style can be done well—look no farther than BTBAM or last year’s critical darling Blood Incantation’s Absolute Elsewhere—but its execution here is too haphazard. The structures of the album’s two longest tracks, “Judgement Day” and “Tempora,” are equally hairy, with the title track finale featuring an entirely unprecedented three-minute surf rock segment that almost made me quit the album entirely. Ideally, a through-composed track has some sort of arc that allows the listener to form expectations about what will come next, and the best bands know when to conform to and when to subvert those expectations. The Biscuit Merchant leans far too heavily on subversion.

Thankfully, when The Biscuit Merchant employs a traditional song structure like on “Victorious” (a shameless rip-off of Opeth’s “Master’s Apprentices”) and “Uncommon Enemies,” The Merchant delivers solid and easily enjoyed bits of progressive death metal. While the instrumental “Amidakuji” goes a bit up its own ass with the number of solos and the intro track “Temporal Delusion” is just an intro track, they too are solid cuts that don’t crumble under unwieldy song structures. Noticeably, these are the four shortest tracks on the album, leaving the vast majority of the record to suffer The Biscuit Merchant’s songwriting woes.

Tempora is certainly an ambitious record, and adventurous metalheads may find individual moments worth dissecting. But for all its energy and genre splicing, Tempora lacks the compositional maturity to tie its parts into a compelling whole. Hopefully, The Biscuit Merchant lets his goods spend a few extra minutes in the oven from here on out.

Recommended tracks: Victorious, Amidakuji, Uncommon Enemies
You may also like: Resuscitate, Xoth, Witch Ripper
Final verdict: 5/10

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

Label: independent

The Biscuit Merchant is:
– Justin Lawnchair (everything)

The post Review: The Biscuit Merchant – Tempora appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: post (clean vocals)
Review by: Josh
Country: US-MI
Release date: 27 August, 2021

Hit-or-miss albums are always challenging. In a way they’re harder listens than completely middling ones, as there’s that lingering thought of “but what if?” left behind. On the other hand, though, that potential is not completely lost, left to perhaps be realized at some point down the line. This doesn’t happen with fully mid albums; at least you know what you’re getting there. Let’s see what side of the tracks Tiny Tree falls on.

The guitar work is easily the high point of XI. The tone is excellent overall, and the riffs are fantastic at creating that repetitive kind of vibe that good post-metal songs are capable of just riding out to. A lot of the better tracks remind me of if The Bees Made Honey In the Lion’s Skull-era Earth decided to flirt with more conventional song structures and cranked up the distortion. The guitars completely make the crescendos of the album as well – in post-metal fashion, many tracks spend their whole runtime building up a single idea and then peaking it towards the end, and the riffs at the climax never miss. I’d go as far as to say that a good deal of tracks on here are hard-carried by the guitar work.

For a song to be hard-carried, though, everything else in it has to be weaker by comparison, and unfortunately that’s exactly the case for the rest of the performances on this album. The vocals and the bass aren’t bad, but aren’t exactly killing it either. The drumming, however, is clearly the worst part of this release by a country mile. The snare drum on this album in particular is horrendous. In harsh contrast to the polished guitar tone, this is almost St. Anger-tier bad, saved only by the fact that it sort of actually sounds like a drum and not a trash can. Nothing else on the kit sounds particularly good, either. I would’ve guessed that the band threw together some low-quality programmed drums for this release, but at the same time programmed drums don’t go off-beat. That’s the other major flaw with the drumming on this release – sometimes the drum track is straight-up out of time with everyone else. Take Idle Eyes for example, a track that by all accounts should have a fantastic climax but misses completely at doing so because of how ridiculously far from being in the pocket the kick drum is. This isn’t remotely the only song like this, too. I hate to overly bash someone’s performance, but the drumming on this is just unfortunate for a release that had the potential to be so much better.

This album isn’t ruined by the drum performance, but it’s frustrating to imagine what it would’ve been like if they just got someone else to do it. Eventually it stops being as distracting as it is at first, though. I wouldn’t call this a bad album, and if you’re a fan of the less sludgy side of post-metal this is worth at least checking out, but I can’t say I see myself coming back to it. If they step up their game on the next one, though? Sign me the hell up.

Recommended tracks: Idle Eyes (you’re just gonna have to get used to the drums), December, Misinformation Effect
Recommended for fans of: If These Trees Could Talk, Tool, Earth (not the super drone-y stuff)
Final verdict: 5.5/10

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

Label: Independent

Tiny Tree is:
– Addison Eilers (guitars, vocals)
– Paul L. Jensen (drums, keys, samples)
– JD Pinkus (guest bassist on December)

The post Review: Tiny Tree – XI appeared first on The Progressive Subway.