Review: Feather Mountain – To Exit A Maelstrom

Style: Progressive Metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Tesseract, Tool, Leprous, Agent Fresco
Review by: Mark
Country: Denmark
Release date: September 2, 2022

Progressive metal is a uniquely demanding balancing act. As a genre sometimes known for focus on technicality, it’s easy to understand how one might fail to engage with it on an emotional level. However, it truly shines when its usual characteristics are used to bolster its narrative, and knowing how to do this effectively is what ultimately separates the pros from the amateurs. To convey dissonant and conflicting emotions, to hypnotize with jagged rhythms, or to sell the feeling of a long journey coming to an end. There’s an incredible power hidden beneath the genre’s surface and when a band comes along showing that they might understand this, it is all hands on deck.

Feather Mountain initially caught my attention as one such band with their second full-length outing To Exit A Maelstrom. The pre-release singles showed attention paid to this harmony of technicality and emotion and, although something did feel familiar, I was keen to get tucked into the rest. Album opener “August Mantra” does a decent job of outlining what’s on the table: contemporary progressive metal in the style of Tesseract, Leprous, and Tool. All hallmarks are present here including dynamic songwriting with intensely shifting energy levels, angular riffing, mixed vocals, genre hopping, and extensive emotive layering poured across most of the compositions. Any fans of those aforementioned bands are going to find themselves pretty comfortable here, but Feather Mountain have not given themselves a modest task by huddling in with the elite of the genre. Not only does this style of music require accomplished musicians just to execute, but to stand out amongst them is even more difficult.

The band do not go to massive lengths to conceal these influences. Single “Pariah” sounds like a track off of Polaris split with an Ihsahn tune, and the entire album either side of that is peppered with the heavy, syncopated riffs of Tool, the jagged grooves of Agent Fresco, and the staccato clean guitar of Malina-era Leprous. As these ingredients are firmly established in the genre, although enjoyable, I ultimately found a little bit of work in separating Feather Mountain from their inspirations.

Make no mistake, what’s on hand here is performed exceptionally well. When vocalist Mikkel Aaen Lohmann belts his high notes it can cut right through you and genuinely leave you feeling moved, the chorus of “Beneath Your Pale Face” being one of the standout examples. The guitar work of Jens Baalkilde Andersen has plenty of subtle flair that never comes across overly conspicuous, and the rhythm section from brothers Andreas and Christian Dahl-Blumenberg is clearly proficient as it handles the complex grooves and genre-hopping with ease.

Regardless of apparent derivativeness, what actually lets To Exit A Maelstrom down ever so slightly is a mix of its composition and production. Large portions of the music can feel oddly cacophonous, where it seems the band simply stacked a few too many ideas on top of each other. “Bliss” is a prime example here, where the overall delivery of the song feels strangely caffeinated and in its later heavy sections the syncopated grooves combine with just a few too many textures to be parsed enjoyably. The more sparse and open songs such as “Sincere” and “Maelstrom” are the more notable tracks on the album as the emotional weight of the band’s songwriting is completely unobstructed and this is a welcome respite from what comes in between.

Some of this busyness is clearly intentional and is revealed as such when we come to examine the themes of this album. For brothers Andreas and Christian, To Exit A Maelstrom was a space to parse the unenviable emotions of losing their father to Alzheimer’s disease and this discomforting rawness is certainly felt at times. I pause at these more discordant moments on the record as they reflect the severely confounding and nebulous nature of such a horrendous illness and it is obvious to me that this is how the band wanted us to feel. Inherent comparisons to the illustrious The Oubliette from The Reticent soon follow and this leads me to conclude that although I strongly felt the disorientation conveyed by the themes and composition of To Exit A Maelstrom, what I regrettably did not feel was the fear and the anxiety that is truly warranted by the gravity of such themes.

Feather Mountain did not have an easy task with this album; to stand out amongst the progressive metal royalty that they have stylistically placed themselves next to, and to do so while also conveying such intensely raw themes is a serious challenge. Their reach and ambition forced me to take this album far more seriously than I do most others, but that also led me to judge them by a much higher standard and it’s one I believe they have mostly met. When it comes to the mechanics of their sound, I hope they make a stronger effort in their next outing to carve their own space in the genre because, if they do, I believe they could be something special.

Recommended tracks: Pariah, Sincere, Maelstrom
You may also like: Altesia, Mental Fracture
Final verdict: 7/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram

Feather Mountain is:
– Mikkel Aaen Lohman (vocals, keys)
– Jens Baalkilde Andersen (guitars)
– Andreas Dahl-Blumendahl (bass)
– Christian Dahl-Blumendahl (drums)