Style: Experimental progressive rock (instrumental)
Review by: Nick
Country: UK
Release date: 7 May, 2021
Voronoi is an experimental progressive rock trio hailing from Leeds who just released their debut album, The Last Three Seconds. Coming in at just under 50 minutes, this album blends together avant-garde jazz, contemporary jazz, metal, and electronic music to create a very…unique sound. And while I appreciate the effort for originality, I feel like it doesn’t quite pan out.
There’s a lot that I want to get into and the best place to start would probably be the production. You’ll notice right from the first track that this album is almost painfully bright. It’s well produced, sure, but that focus on the brighter range damns it from having depth in terms of the dynamics in the album. In moments where there’s a big climax like on “Home Could Be Lightyears Away”, the disproportionate focus on the high end leaves the mix feeling like an assault of noise. It’s okay to focus on the high end at parts (the focus there actually benefits the more reserved sections of the album) but leaving all of the focus there and not giving the lower range any presence just ends up hurting the overall sound of the album.
Another point I wanted to touch on is the compositions themselves. Pretty much every track less than five minutes feels almost like a voice memo, like it’s a snippet of a larger track that they came up with that they recorded for future reference. Take the opening track for example, “Interstellar Something”. The entire track is just a couple chords being toyed around with for three and a half minutes. It’s not necessarily bad, it just feels half-baked and uninteresting. Half-baked is actually a great single-term summary for how I feel about this album, because even most of the tracks that try to deviate from their starting point feel like rough demos.
Possibly the worst example I can come up with for this is “Darker The Night” which starts with a haunting synth intro that abruptly leads into a piano part that feels like a song ripped from a video game. This beautiful piano part builds up an intense atmosphere and great tension that is just thrown in the bin by a seemingly progressive metal section. This song could rip, it has all the components to rip, and yet it’s so undercooked that it just sounds rough. The closest they get to a really solid song on the first half of the album is “The Nauseator” which is a sprawling ten minute piece. But even with a full ten minutes to smooth out each section, it still just feels like a mish mash of variations on a certain melody without any real cohesion.
This isn’t to say there aren’t good moments. In fact the final three tracks are actually quite great, especially the 12 minute long “The Outsider and The Priest”. Throughout each of these tracks you can see a strong, coherent approach that was lacking during the five prior tracks. The songs naturally grow and morph into their own beings rather than feel like a taped together collage of takes on one part, and the genres are perfectly combined whereas before they felt splotched together. The title track takes a tense electronic approach with those avant-garde elements and video game music. “The Outsider and The Priest” goes full on jazz for the vast majority of the track and leans back into the realm of progressive rock just over two thirds in. And finally the earlier mentioned final track, “Home Could Be Lightyears Away”, takes a sort of post rock approach to the song structure. It builds up tension until the last quarter of the track where they can go all out in a cacophony of noise.
It’s these three tracks that make me so goddamn disappointed with the rest of the album. These tracks show exactly what Voronoi is capable of. Had these tracks not been on here I may not have been as brutal in this review. I may have been able to chalk it up to a case of an experiment that didn’t work or a band that has yet to find their sound, but with these three tracks I just can’t do that. With these three tracks I just feel like I listened to a solid three song EP with an extra 25 minutes tacked on to the start. It’s a shame, but at the same time I’m left hopeful at what they might do in the future.
Recommended tracks: The Priest and The Outsider, The Last Three Seconds, Home Could Be Lightyears Away
Recommended for fans of: Tigran Hamasyan, avant garde jazzy prog
Final verdict: 3.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook
Label: Independent
Voronoi is:
– Sam Quintana (bass)
– Tom Higham (drums)
– Aleks Podraza (keyboard)
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