Review: 1000 Bone Cylinder Explosion – Bind

Style: Avant-garde Black/Thrash Metal (mixed vocals) 
Review by: Zach
Country: US-PA
Release date: 1 October, 2021

You can tell a lot about an album from the cover art. Over the years, the subgenres have perfected their own style of art that tells me what I’m in for before I hit play. Black metal has forests and desolate landscapes. Death metal has fantasy, science fiction, and desolate landscapes. Doom metal has whatever conveys an immense sadness and desolate landscapes. But prog…well, I can always tell a prog album when I see it.

And I make no exaggeration when I say this album cover perfectly conveys the music on it. I expect nothing less from Peter Hraur and Greg Bogart, the brains behind 1000 Bone Cylinder Explosion. Even the name fits the music that follows! You may know them respectively as the guitarist/harsh vocalist and drummer of Lör, who were one of my first forays into the underground prog scene. But Lör want you to take them semi-seriously with their music, and the cover of In Forgotten Sleep reflects that. 1kBCE already tells you everything you need to know with that cover.

But how does it sound? The answer is pretty fucking good. Incredibly silly, but in a competent way. Actually, I think it’s far past the point of silly and going for downright unhinged. Almost as if UneXpect dialed down the chaos and decided to write a thrash album. But, calling this just a thrash album is doing it a great disservice. This has elements of black, death, prog (duh), and of course the power metal edge from Lör. 

If I assembled every adjective to describe prog metal and stuck them to a dartboard, whatever it landed on would be able to describe Bind, and the best way to boil it down is calling this “melodic-chaotic”. You could power a small village with the sheer amount of kinetic, non-stop energy of this record. And every time you do get to a stop, like the small funky break in ‘Aporia’, you better expect an absolutely bone (heh) crushing riff to follow.

You want a gentle intro track to get you settled in? Too bad. Instead, ‘Start’ wastes no time showing the thrashy side of this album with one of the best intro riffs I’ve heard all year. And at the end, almost like the sky clearing after a torrential downpour, the strangeness of this record begins to show with a chanting choir and riffs that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Lör record. Things get even stranger with the eclectic soundscape interlude on ‘Continue’, sandwiched right between two breakneck thrash sections.

Though, as breakneck as Bind may be, it doesn’t fall into the same pitfall that many thrash records do. Thrash makes up a very, very small percentage of my library for this one specific reason. When the entire album’s mood and sound is constantly as angry as humanly possible for the entire duration, I’m only ever going to put it on at the gym. But the two madmen who made this album decided to give us lowly listeners a single interlude track so our brains didn’t explode in the second half. Thanks guys.

And what a second half it is. Starting with ‘A Table in the Middle of the Room’, 1KBCE hits stride after stride. Every riff and bit of craziness seems perfectly placed after this point, without it seeming the least bit unnecessary. Riffs, choirs, clean sections, weird sections, it has it all. And while most “avant-garde” bands would rely on unconventional instruments, 1KBCE seem to manage just fine with the usual metal repertoire at their disposal.

With most albums, I’d be exhausted by the 8^th song. With albums like these, I’d be exhausted by the 5^th. But for some reason, even with the 10-minute opus of a closer, ‘Untether’, Bind held my interest all the way through. This entire album is like a buildup to that one final riff in the closer. A riff that’s heavier than an elephant dropped from space, its almost a reward for surviving the sheer insanity that comes before.

This is not an album for everyone, I should preface that now. If you like frantic insanity broken up by scant clean sections that are just as insane, this is for you. If you want something a little more relaxed…look elsewhere for your own safety. This is not an album that’s going to be on constant rotation, just because my brain can barely keep up with whatever the hell Hraur and Bogart have created here. But I can acknowledge musical genius when I see it.

Recommended tracks: Start, Continue, A Table in the Middle of the Room, Aporia, Untether
Recommended for fans of: Wuthering Heights, UneXpect, Voivod, Coroner, Destroyer 666, Skeletonwitch
You may also like: Bull Elephant, Howling Sycamore, Acrylazea, Lör
Final verdict: 8.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Metal-Archives page

Label: Independent

1000 Bone Cylinder Explosion is:
– Peter Hraur (Guitars, Bass, Vocals, Songwriting, Engineering, Mixing Mastering, Cover art)
– Greg Bogart (Drums, Artwork)