Reports from the Underground: April 2020 prog reviewed (part 1)

Black Painted Moon – Personæ (Italy)
Style: Traditional (clean, female vocals)
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Review by: Sam

Finding a band that worships Dream Theater is easy. Finding a band that worships Dream Theater that is actually talented is uncommon. Finding a band that worships Dream Theater that is talented and have a sound (relatively) their own is actually pretty rare. Enter Black Painted Moon. A friend on Discord recommended this band to me, and seeing how they weren’t on ANY cataloguing website nor did they have a Bandcamp page, I just had to review them.

There’s a lot to like here. First thing that struck me about this band is the vocals. As I mentioned they are female, but they do not sound like the type of female metal singers you’re used to. It’s like a pop singer/songwriter a la Christina Aguilera suddenly decided prog metal was her passion all along. I really like the swagger it brings. She’s got some real pipes and her vocal presence is commanding. The phrasing and articulation can get kinda muffled at times, but her talent is tremendous. Another standout performance that struck me was the keyboard playing. The patch choices are tasteful and the atmosphere created is great. “Shell of Lies” in particular highlights the keys well.

The songwriting however is a mixed bag. The overall playing is amazing and there are many awe-inspiring moments, but often the songs just tend to suddenly fade out of existence, like they weren’t sure what to do with them anymore. Again I have to highlight “Shell of Lies”. It’s a fantastic song for about 7 and a half minutes, with a very fun Haken-inspired instrumental section at the end, but then the last 3 minutes are an atmospheric fadeout of some sort? It makes no sense. All the tension that was built up just dissolves over “a t m o s p h e r e”. Nothing really happens in these final 3 minutes. It’s kinda like “The Count of Tuscany” just ended after the quiet part. And there are many more of these moments on the album. Songs with great build-up, great quirky instrumentals and great singing, but then they just fizzle out and you’re stuck wondering what even happened in the first place. They especially seem to struggle at bringing the tension they built to a fitting climax. Combined with some awfully muffled mixing this just makes the record very hard to listen to. Seriously, that drum tone makes even Mangini’s drums on the self-titled sound good. I guess a positive is that you can hear each instrument clearly? Though that isn’t completely honest either as the GUITAR of all things gets buried behind the synths and the obscenely loud drums more often than you’d like. Speaking of guitars, they are missing ferocity. During this record I often found myself missing some quality aggressive riffs and his solos barely get into shredding territory either. The mellower stuff he’s good at, but he lacks the intensity and ferociousness needed for the heavier bits. Just give me a neck breaker every once in a while. It’d be appreciated. Lastly, I highly recommend you to refrain from reading the lyrics. Those are… not good. 

When all is said and done though, Personæ is an album filled to the brim with potential. As of now, there is a lot that still needs to be improved upon, but the talent is there. Should they fix the issues listed in the review, we might just have a classic album on our hands next time. Let’s hope that this will be the When Dream and Day Unite to their Images and Words, so to speak.

Recommended tracks: Drown Into You, M.P.D.
Recommended for fans of: Dream Theater, early Haken, Seventh Wonder
Final verdict: 6/10

Grav Morbus – Masohhist (Estonia)
Style: Post-Black (harsh vocals)
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Review by: Matt

Masohhist… What to say? I rolled my eyes at this album a couple of times, yet I still think it’s good. It doesn’t offer anything new – melancholy post-rock-tinged black metal with the metal dialed down to about 10% – but hey, the mix is tasty and the mood agrees with me. The album leans more towards acoustics than delay pedal noodling, and basically keeps them separate from the distorted parts. Only three songs have any real claim to metaldom, with the blasty “Külmun” being the best of these, and the clean stuff is usually about ten times better anyway. I don’t know why, but the composition of the “riffs” is just way behind everything else, as if they were written years earlier and only now built around.

Every musician eventually feels stuck in certain chord progressions, but it’s never been quite so obvious as here. The first song rides a i-iv-VI-VII for eleven minutes, probably the most generic and obvious metal progression you could think of… None of the stuff on top attempts to elaborate on that or add much color. Then it comes back, barely modified, in Leia Mind Rahu and Memento Mori. While it doesn’t singlehandedly tank the songs, I just find it cheap. Luckily, the other stuff is classier, and the atmosphere always hits the right somber tone without being overbearing. This isn’t really the kind of album you need to nitpick, unless you’re a reviewer padding a word count. It’s fine, “meditative,” you might say, and I enjoyed hearing it.

Recommended tracks: K, Külmun
Recommended for fans of: Heretoir, Alcest
Final verdict: 7/10

Brucifer – Caveat Emptor! (US-OH)
Style: Synth-Prog Metal (instrumental)
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook
Review by: Chris

I would like to get three things on the record before I get into this review.

1. This Album cover is true art and I love it
2. This Album has some great movie references in the titles and throughout
3. RIki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is like a top 10 Hong Kong flick for me

Ok now we can talk about music. This is a pretty cool synth heavy prog-metal album. From my understanding Brucifer is a solo project of a drummer, which definitely shows in multiple ways. For one, the drum performance is pretty good overall. It may lean a little into the side of over indulgence a few times but not enough to annoy me, a drummer who hates over indulgent drums. Secondly, there are a lot of parts that feel to me like they were written to the underlying beat rather than the other way around, as is typically done. There are definitely an abundance of odd times going on throughout, though I felt many times the signatures were odd timed in the sense of traditional prog. For me   that is when beats and riffs very clearly repeat on the odd times over and over, which I find tends to lead to the somewhat clinical feel that usually turns me off of traditional prog. I found the synth tones here fun enough to not let that deter me.

“Kung Fury” (good movie) opens the album with a pretty much entirely synth and drums song which features a lot of tones that would fit in pretty well on any album where Jordan Rudess plays keys. Within a couple minutes you really find yourself in sections that would fit right in on some Dream Theater albums, albeit with less guitar and a synth bass. “The Story of Ricky” and “Replicant” really show the   heavier riff side of things, in that kind of running heavy style of riff. That said, there are a few breakdown-esque moments, such as in “The Story of Ricky” which has multiple short breakdowns with dark synth arpeggiators going on above it. Most of the songs include some samples of movie lines in them, but I wanted to highlight “Stranger Danger” which includes several lines from 2016’s Dr. Strange and which seemed to follow the feeling of the movie pretty decently in my head.

Honestly, the choice of synth sounds throughout is pretty interesting, with even some times where within 15 seconds the synth sounds go from Jordan Rudess, to Tony Kaye(Yes), to something that would fit right in on the soundtrack of Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening in the 4th dungeon or so. I think it suffers slightly from a bit of over-reliance on the fast sequencer and arpeggiating sequences in some of the tracks as backstops to breakdown-ish parts. This album goes to a lot of places without really getting there, the same way looking at pictures of exotic vacation locations is not the same as visiting. The synth patch changes added some variety but I didn’t always feel like the identities of the songs were changing enough to make me feel like I was moving to something new. That’s not necessarily always an issue. It just means it can sometimes venture into the territory of background music. The closing song of Caveat Emptor! was a standout moment. I’m interested to see if Brucifer can maintain that level of composition going forward. I’d love to hear more like it.

Recommended tracks: The Story of Ricky, Stranger Danger, The Process of Elimination
Recommended for fans of: Dream Theater, weird Haken parts, video game music, movie references
Final verdict: 7/10

Azusa – Loop of Yesterdays (Greece/Norway/US-PN)
Style: Metalcore (mixed vocals)
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Review by: Josh

Azusa are an incredibly harsh band, appealing to a very specific kind of metal listener. Do you want to hear the auditory equivalent of having your face ripped off by a chimpanzee on meth? If you answered yes to the previous question, this is the band for you.

There are a variety of things that make this album as heavy as it is, but first and foremost it has gotta be the vocalist. Singer Eleni Zafiriadou can scream with the best of them, to the point that it’s almost impossible for one to conceive that she was in a pop group before this. Her style of screaming is beyond aggressive, bringing up comparisons to Greg Puciato and Scott Kelly, but she’s also unique in her own way. Definitely not for the faint of heart, but anyone who can get used to them will find themselves instant fans. The rest of the band does their best to match her performance, and given that they’re all former members of the Extol, sans the bassist, who was in The Dillinger Escape Plan, this is not particularly difficult for them. The drummer is always occupied in either beating the shit out of the snare drum or the kick drum at any given time, the guitarist excels at bringing in chaotic yet coherent riffs, and the bassist has one of the heaviest tones I’ve ever heard. Everything’s set for an auditory beatdown…

…except when they’re not doing that. Azusa enhance their heaviness even further by juxtaposing it with eerie lighter passages that start just as abruptly as they end, keeping the listener on their toes as they listen through the album. These passages are executed incredibly well. The singer’s prior pop experience really shines through with her excellent clean vocals, enhanced through the use of erratic panning and vocal effects. The rest of the band is no slouch here, either. The bass and drums take a back seat to the guitar, which lays down some incredibly ominous clean riffs. These riffs also crop up from time to time during the heavier portions of the album, but during the lighter sections, they’re on full display. The band also isn’t afraid to experiment here. There are the aforementioned vocal modifications, but they also bring in a string section from time to time. Listening to this album, one never really knows what to expect next.

Some will consider this a masterpiece. If what I have written at all appeals to you, be sure to check this out, because “some” might just include you.

Recommended tracks: The three song stretch of Monument, Loop of Yesterdays, and Rapture Boy is excellent
Recommended for fans of: The Dillinger Escape Plan, Converge, Extol, Death
Final verdict: 8/10