Reports from the Underground: May 2020 prog reviewed (part 2)

Mountaineer – Bloodletting (US-CA)
Style: Doomgaze (Mixed vocals)
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Review by: Jonah

Even though I think I’ve had some consistently high album ratings in my reviews this year, there have been very few that I’ve listened to and just immediately fell in love with. Most of what I’ve covered thus far has fallen within the “pretty good” and “very good” range, but very little “great” or “exceptional”. Well, that time has finally come, because through some California witchcraft Mountaineer have crafted the single best doomgaze album I’ve ever heard.

Do you want gorgeous, sensual melodic lead guitars? They’re here in abundance. Massive skull-crushing, fuzzy riffs? Those are here too. Intricate and mesmerizing drum patterns that I’m still working on figuring out? You better believe it. Big, bone-shaking bass guitar? Yeah boy they’re here too. To cap it all off you’ve got these gorgeous, soaring clean vocals that wouldn’t feel out of place on the best albums of the grunge era, and some absolutely massive Neurosis style harsh vocals. All of this combined together leads to some of the best music I’ve heard in 2020, and honestly some of the best music I’ve heard in the past couple years, which is no easy feat because some of my all-time favorite albums came out in the past couple years.

Shifting the focus from performance to sound quality for a moment, this is a beautifully produced album. The mix is perfection, I can hear each and every element of the music just clearly enough, without damaging the fuzzy, oppressive sonic aesthetic the band have gone for. This leads to the entire sound coming through as both crushing and beautiful, suffocating and freeing, heavy and soaring all at once.

This is one of the best performed, best sounding and overall best albums I’ve heard so far this year. Usually I would put a little “well if you like this genre check the band out!” blurb here but honestly, you owe it to yourself to listen to this album regardless of whether you’re usually a fan of doom, or shoegaze, or post-metal, or sludge, or any of the other things happening here. This is just an exceptional piece of music that deserves to be listened to.

Recommended tracks: The Weeds I Have Tended, Bloodletting, Shot Through With Sunlight
Recommended for fans of: Holy Fawn, Latitudes, Alcest
Final verdict: 10/10

Complex – Humana involución (Chile)
Style: Thrash (Mixed vocals)
Related links: Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Metal-Archives page
Review by: Dylan

… how did this album make it’s way into our list? 

We’re not snobby about the term “progressive” or even “metal” in this blog. We’ve reviewed things that are barely progressive, and thinks that edged on pop/rock, but to some degree, you could always find a way to justify it’s presence on the blog. As far as Humana Involucion goes, I can’t find a way to justify reviewing this. 

It’s.. thrash metal! Very very very thrashy, lots of 80’s influence, fast, head-bangable, good ol extreme metal. And it’s pretty freaking good at that, it makes for a really fun album. 

But damn, it is certainly not progressive. If you live for anything that defines prog music, stay the hell away from this.

Recommended tracks: Balas Contra el Pueblo
Recommended for fans of: Slayer, Early Death
Final verdict: 7/10

Astolat – The Winning Tragedy (Sweden)
Style: Symphonic Doom (Mixed vocals)
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Review by: Mars*

The Winning Tragedy is the debut album of Swedish progressive symphonic doom band Astolat. The vocals are a mix of cleans and harshes with segments of spoken word. Lyrics are mostly in English with some Swedish tracks. Production is relatively clean and on the nicer side of passable. While The Winning Tragedy is a fresh and unique album that solidifies Astolat’s identity, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

The Winning Tragedy does not start off on the right foot, which can be discouraging on a first listen. As far as orchestral pieces go, the opening track “An Oncoming Storm” is bland and overstays its welcome. It’s clear that the track was intended to introduce and set the tone for the album, but it’s slow and tiring and does little justice to the rest of the album. This stands in contrast to other symphonic bands such as Fleshgod Apocalypse and Septicflesh who have released purely orchestral versions of their tracks which function effectively as individual pieces of music. “An Oncoming Storm” provides a decent scope of the rest of the symphonic elements across the album, though. These symphonic elements are never the main attraction and often serve as background or to carry rhythm. The second track, “The Spark,” doesn’t do the album much justice either. It’s a decent song but drags on for two minutes past its point of interest.

The Winning Tragedy quickly recovers from this slow start, building up in scope and engagement before hitting a fever pitch in the fourth to last track, “Sisyphus.” Track three, “Embers of Unrest,” is a pleasant piece that effectively dabbles in sludge and heavy metal without overstaying its welcome. Tracks four to eight solidify the album’s prog doom identity quite nicely and are overall a good experience but not the highlight. Track six, “The Brightest Days & The Dark Descent” deserves special mention. It is a beautiful and sombre acoustic interlude that could have easily been the first track on the album. It emphasizes what Astolat have proven to be quite great at, which is for the most part seamlessly working acoustic elements into their music.

Tracks nine and beyond, from “Sisyphus” to “Over the Clouds of Thunder,” are the real highlight of the album and, alongside “The Brightest Days & The Dark Descent,” could have easily made a fantastic EP that I’d have a hard time rating any lower than an 8.5 out of 10. “Sisyphus” masterfully blends symphonic elements with the aforementioned mix of sludge and heavy metal into an eight-minute odyssey that is musically and lyrically engaging. The vocals occupy this perfect balance between actual singing and spoken word that let the lyrics hang boldly over the song. The changing time signatures work perfectly and engineer the song into something so gestalt and interlocking that attempting to compartmentalize it would do a severe injustice. This song could easily break into the favorites of any Wilderun or Fleshgod Apocalypse fan. The next track, “Unto These Pilgrims Windswept” steps back into the acoustic realm for the first half in a way honestly reminiscent of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” I feel that the introduction is a minute longer than it needs to be, but that is a minor critique. The song blasts off like a missile at the four minute mark, turning into a confluent atmosphere which sounds like a war between a dark brooding and a glorious pride. As with “Sisyphus,” the song is lyrically engaging. I would honestly compare this track to Mabool-era Orphaned Land. The second to last track, “The Bittersweet Dead End” is the crowning achievement of the album. It’s basically everything I said about Sisyphus except better and with more doom. The song is a journey of building a releasing tension through changing time signatures and the seamless placement of organ interludes. The final song, “Over the Clouds of Thunder” is a beautiful little sendoff that highlights the strengths of the album. For the first minute it’s a mini-medley of the rest of the album but turns into a unique and solemn piece that sounds like a promise of something more.

Overall, Astolat was on the verge of greatness with The Winning Tragedy. It would have definitely benefited from fewer songs. The peaks of the album are extremely high while the low are passable. There are no overtly bad songs on the album but it doesn’t take long to realize that some of the tracks are much better than others. I am very excited to see what Astolat releases in the future.

Recommended tracks: Sisyphus, Unto These Pilgrims Windswept, The Bittersweet Dead End, Over Clouds of Thunder
Recommended for fans of: Wilderun, Fleshgod Apocalypse 
Final verdict: 7/10

Ancient Curse – The New Prophecy (Germany)
Style: Thrash/Power/Prog/Groove (clean vocals)
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Review by: Matt

This is a strange one. Ancient Curse last released an album in 1997, so all bets are off as to what they’re going to sound like a quarter century later. Sometimes this album wants to be Nevermore, with brutal groovy seven-string riffs, and other times some happy singsong power metal creeps in, like the title track or the chorus on “Fire and Ice.” It’s downright strange hearing that over such low guitars. All options are on the table here, with the only constant being that it’s structurally dense and really damn heavy.

Ancient Curse take a lot of risks with outlandish key and tempo changes, but a lot of it feels like “why not” rather than strategic or necessary. Usually I like when songs have two distinct halves, but “Men of the Storm”‘s long swung section amounts to little before they get bored and unceremoniously dump it back into 4/4. “Hypnotize” picks up and drops the pace so many times that it’s numbing. While the album starts pretty strong with “We Follow the Signs,” a more focused but still nutty power metal song, by the fourth track these winding excursions get exhausting. Even the fast parts later on tend to be pretty dour and not all that fun. They’re going for dark and complex, but the most songwriting payoff it results in is “huh, okay then.”

I really didn’t like The New Prophecy the first time through, but I’ve come to respect it. It’s different and ambitious, and at least it keeps the riffs coming. There’s probably a specific brand of metalhead that will be into this, but this weird noncommittal blend isn’t for me. In my opinion, it doesn’t totally succeed at anything it attempts besides heaviness, but you’ve got to admire the ballsiness of it.

Recommended tracks: We Follow the Signs, Mind Chaos
Recommended for fans of: Communic, Nevermore
Final verdict: 6/10

R U N – For You Will Never Find Peace Within Your Quiet (Australia)
Style: Blackened Hardcore/Metalcore (Harsh vocals)
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Review by: Chris

Blackened Hardcore is one of those things I always hear about but never get around to checking in on to see how it is going. If the rest of it sounds somewhat like this EP by R U N then maybe I have been missing out. It is a really interesting mix that while a bit jarring at first, has been handled well in the EP to really balance out the raw vocal emotions Hardcore songs tend to have with the instrumental weight and feeling Blackened tendencies offer.

The album begins with “For You”, which opens with immediate blackened fury before the vocals come in and make it very clear this has roots in hardcore. A quick moment of quiet preceding a faraway mantra yell into a very passionate chorus really slams home the hardcore roots. Just as quickly you are led back into blasting riffs and black metal tones. It really is an interesting meeting of the minds between the kind of “tough-guy” hardcore feeling and the more nuanced, melancholic feeling blackened tonalities tend to bring along. The next song “Will Never” was probably the most hardcore and straight forward and probably my least favorite. I preferred when the hardcore/metalcore parts of the album came as obvious “anthem moments” if you will as moments of tropes inside of songs. I use trope positively, these usages are very fresh but have that feeling of a familiar place.

The later tracks in the EP even have moments that almost harken to an Ulcerate style of dissonance (though not to a similar degree) which are really cool and made me stop and rewind multiple times. “Within” is probably my favorite track, opening with a slightly pushed back chord teasing, before immediately turning into something that feels almost like a normal Hardcore albums closer, slamming you in the head with a repeatable mantra and anthemic guitar lines. Suddenly the song seemingly ends until really turning into another something that belongs on an Ulcerate album…and then the anthemic guitar line returns to bring it all full circle.

I had a lot of fun listening to this EP to be honest, and at 20 minutes it’s really worth a couple listens. Also, props to the band for doing the thing where the song names spell the album title.

Recommended tracks: For You, Within, Your Quiet
Recommended for fans of: Leviathan, Counterparts, Loathe
Final verdict: 7.5/10