Style: mathcore/electronic ambient/extreme metal (???) (mostly harsh vocals)
Review by: Sam
Country: US-MA
Release date: 20-04-2018
NOTE: This album was originally included in the 2018 missed albums issue of The Progressive Subway
Hooooooolllyyy shit I completely forgot about this album. I promised Dan on the r/progmetal discord to review his album for missed editions, but it was only last Wednesday I realized I hadn’t bookmarked the album. So hence I listened to the album like 7 times in 3 days to review it anyway.
ISA is a band that is extremely hard to describe. Dan described it as progressive black/death metal, but since metal-archives rejected this band for being “too core-y/math-y/weird” (to the outrage of the r/progmetal Discord) I realized classification would not become an easy task. Listening to the full thing made it even harder to describe. If I had to pick one genre to pin this band on, I’d probably say mathcore, but I realize that doesn’t even begin to describe everything that’s happening here. There are elements of Progressive Metal, Black Metal, Tech Death, Math Rock, Metalcore and Electronic ambient scrambled all over the place. Such a wild combination can never work right? Let’s find out.
Let’s start off the bat by noting how utterly chaotic this album is. The amount of genres I listed should already give an indication, but there’s more. It’s one constant flow of crazy rhythms, noodly guitars, raspy blackened vocals, melodies and a whole lot of other stuff going on in the background. It should be obvious by now that this is not an easy album to listen to.
The chaotic nature of this album is at the same time its strength and its weakness. On one hand this is not music that would blossom with a rigid structure. In a very organic fashion you can transition between a dreamy electronic ambient landscape into a schizophrenic Mathcore/Extreme Metal guitar onslaught and everything that goes in between. The vocals arrangements for starters are really cool. Just listen to Stage III: Heathens for example. The rhythmic, air-y vocal lines are definitely a standout on the album. This formlessness makes it hard to predict where the music is going to take you, making it a very engaging listen. It’s really impressive what happens in this album.
But on the other hand this lack of form can also turn this into a homogeneous mass of chaos. There are so many layers and transitions it’s hard to find something to grab onto. I listened to this album seven times, yet I can still barely recall a single hook. Now hooks aren’t something that music like this is going for obviously, but there needs to be something that sinks in the listener which makes them coming back to the album. Even a band like Between the Buried and Me, who are utter chaos to my ears in most cases, still have hooks behind their music. ISA falls short a lot in this aspect.
This problem is shown with the riffs for example. They switch between either Mathcore noodling or heavy chugging, but there’s no single riff that will grab your attention. So while they’re technically impressive and crunchy, ultimately it becomes just another element in the chaos. More individually memorable guitar parts would definitely be an aspect in which this band could improve on for next album.
What’s also definitely a negative on this album is the mixing. The keyboards are barely audible (which is a shame since they’re done very well), and for all the various layers in the music it doesn’t seem like all of them are in the sonic place they’re intended to be. Melodies tend to get lost in the background when the riffs get too heavy and the drumming tends to take too much space when it gets intense. And most of the interesting Avant-Garde vocal arrangements with dual vocals seem uneven in the mix. It’s not like the mix is inexcusably bad though. It’s still produced with enough clarity that you can discern everything that’s happening with effort. But it’s definitely a far cry from what it intends to be.
So on the whole I’m not really sure what to rate this album. Listening to ISA is like a really intense dream, that’s extremely vivid and real while happening, but you forget it as soon as it’s over. In that aspect the annoying alarm noise in the final track is a perfect summary of what happened. You feel like it could have, maybe should have gone on longer, but it’s time to wake up, and move on to other things. It’s definitely an impressive debut, but there’s still a lot that needs to be done to truly make waves in the Progressive Metal scene.
Recommended tracks: all or none
Recommended for fans of: Between the Buried and Me, Dissona, chaotic ambient
Final verdict: 7/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | RYM page
Label: Independent
ISA is:
– Dan (all instruments)
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