Reports from the Underground: Albums We Missed in 2020

Good day reader! Today we’re doing things a bit different. Opposed to the individual reviews we’ve been doing recently, we’re switching back to the batch reviews for this. It’s not like we will continue doing these after this, but we thought it was a good idea to bundle all of missed albums together to increase the pace with which we can move onto 2021 releases. It’s February already, and it’s time we move on from 2020. Next week our AOTY list will come out, and now we talk about the albums that slipped us by. We will post these retroactively as individual ones as well, but for now it’s in a batch post.

This is usually the point where I start talking utter nonsense, but I’ve no inspiration for that currently. Don’t worry I’ve scratched my brain plenty with my quantum backscratcher (it chooses not to exist where I don’t want it to exist, so essentially it goes through my skull and straight to my brain, obviously) to deliver some killer bullshit, but it turned out to be a futile exercise. Though speaking of futile, this post is an excellent example of futility. Let me explain.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might know how we find our albums. Unlike a lot of other blogs, promos aren’t our primary source of albums. Instead, we search for everything ourselves (and take a few promos if they sound good). That was the entire premise of how this thing started anyway. I, Sam, was searching for good prog metal albums using Metal-Archives’ advanced search function. Clicking on every single one of them, and sampling every single one of them, I got to a selection of albums to review. Fast forward two and a half years, and we’ve expanded upon this strategy massively. We also search Bandcamp releases now, as well as Heavy Blog’s new release dump, as well as r/progmetal’s spreadsheet, as well as a ton of other miscellaneous sources. Sounds pretty thorough right? Well, it might be, but even then we still miss a ton. Reviewing every good album out there apparently isn’t doable, and attempting to do so is only futile.

Yet it is exactly that futile endeavor which led to this post. There’s always more to review, and we will always try to cover as much as we can. Even as this post is still inevitably missing out on good things, we will do our darnedest to cover as much as we can. And thanks to that effort, this edition is filled to the brim with great albums. I am 100% confident you’ll find something to your liking in here with how varied our selection is. There should be some sort of proper closing sentence here, but my brain is going through some system repairs (backscratchers should only be applied to the back obviously), so there’s no room to come up with such a thing. Reviews good, you read, me happy. Unga bunga. Bye.

Fughu – Lost Connection (Argentina)
Style: Experimental/Traditional Prog Metal (clean vocals)
Related links: Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Metal-Archives page
Review by: Dylan

I want to be upfront with you; It is very likely that I’m out of my depth as far as this album is concerned. What first grabbed my attention was its description on the spreadsheet we use being “Dream Theater meets David Bowie’’, but it turned out to be something far more quirky than what that sounds like. But then what is to be expected when you press play in a Fughu song?

There’s three elements which I find to be very important in their style, the very first one being the various vocal styles. The “main” one is already quite unique… he sounds like that one villain in a sci-fi musical (does that even exist? Even if it doesn’t I swear to god it makes sense) who’s singing about their evil plan to make every citizen a gorilla or some bizarre shit like that. It’s not only tonally enjoyable but also rather varied, with various production techniques used to set different moods. The second element that appears as a main characteristic are the heavy use of keyboard driven melodies. Being a keyboard maniac myself, this was a very welcome addition with it’s many samples fitting the unusual tone of the album perfectly (There’s even that synth patch used in every Simpson’s house of horror episode!). Thirdly, a few, non-frequent influences from none other than Dream Theater, with the track “Told You” being it’s most obvious “DT-like song’’ still having a very unique flair within what is presented. Does this sound wacky? It usually is, not gonna lie. But it’s delightfully varied, tasteful, and intriguing. It’s that kind of album you don’t really know what to make of in the first listen, but captivates you the more time you have with it.

Fughu have come up with a flair unique enough that I find it pretty hard to compare them to anyone. The closest terrible comparison I can make you is if Voivod decided to make progressive rock/metal, with a 70’s influence that also had heavy keyboards, and a cartoon-villain influenced voice. If that doesn’t catch your attention, I don’t know what will.

Recommended tracks: Stay, The Goat, Right From the Bone
Recommended for fans of: I don’t know man…
Final verdict: 8.3/10