Review: Somnium de Lycoris – In the Falling Hours

Style: technical death metal (mostly harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: technical death metal, The Artisan Era, Dream Theater, Imperial Circus Dead Decadence, Spawn of Possession, First Fragment (no YMAL needed since if you’re still here, you know all the bands)
Review by: Andy
Country: Japan
Release date: 1 December 2023

I so desperately want to flex my technical death metal knowledge. Everybody who’s ever talked to my peer Zach for more than five minutes knows that he LOVES Opeth and also that he’s heard every single tech death band ever. Well, I’m jealous that people don’t associate me with the genre. As a result, I picked up Somnium de Lycoris to review, a Japanese tech band releasing their debut, In the Falling Hours, so that I could namedrop their similarities to Deviant Process, Bloody Cumshot, Aronious, The Beast of Nod, NYN, Vomit the Hate, Widow’s Peak, Equipoise… yeah, Somnium de Lycoris haven’t really carved out much of a niche yet.

For the most part, In the Falling Hours is STUPID tech, the endless stream of solos and riffs so fast, flashy, and melodic that the barrage of notes seems to be quickly approaching the number of atoms in the universe. There is no subtlety or art to the composition, only an ungodly, deafening onslaught of unrelenting metal. Somnium de Lycoris sounds like every tech death band you’ve ever heard at different points in the album—from the Spawn of Possession percussive vocals and contrapuntal noodling of “Beginnings and Endings” to the Equipoise-y “Obstacles in Our Path” to the tight Soreption-groove of “The Bridge to Nowhere.” The virtuosic skill on display is off-the-charts, but that’s kinda the baseline for the style, so I’m not very impressed by the endless wankery anymore.

Where Somnium de Lycoris does start to break the mold is with their odd melodic flourishes, incorporating elements of both Dream Theater and Japanese power metal; in fact, if I hadn’t ever seen Somnium de Lycoris were Japanese, I still reckon I could’ve guessed because the piano parts feel so redolent of the insanity of Zemeth or Imperial Circus Dead Decadence. The clear highlights of the album, as seen in the recommended tracks, push the piano and prog metal influence the furthest, and they stand out in a sea of similarity, and a sea it is; at just over an hour, this is longer than Relentless Mutation and Bleed the Future combined. Intense music like this needs to breathe, especially if approaching anywhere near the hour mark, but Somnium de Lycoris rarely stop to smell the roses: they drive by them in a hypercar at four times the speed limit. In the Falling Hours is thrilling for a couple minutes, particularly because it starts with the best track on the album—instrumental opener “What Lies Beneath” which mixes sickening melodic trem picking, clean guitar solos, tech death bass, literal Dream Theater worship, and insane major key Japanese power metal-type progressions—but the novelty quickly wears off, and as a long-time tech listener I just want a slower jazzy passage or even the dreaded interlude track. This album is suffocating.

Further contributing to the lack of breathing room is a brickwalled production full of the common pitfalls of modern tech. The sound is overly polished with inorganic drums, and every instrument equally weighted at all times creates a deafening wall of sound (note: so that’s where the term brickwalling comes from). The benefit is that the bass is always audible doing unholy, sexual things with the guitar and piano, but it comes with the cost of tremendous listening fatigue. I love a lot of the ideas and riffs—like the surreal piano and main riff of “Obstacles in Our Path,” which also solos as hard as hecking Equipoise—but the album so clearly sounds like a debut, youthfully ambitious yet with no control or finesse.  

At the end of the day, I know I’ve got a pretty bad bias toward tech, and I want to score this higher than I will. I enjoy it a lot—when the power and prog metal influences come out most of all—but I prefer to have some semblance of objectivity as a reviewer, and In the Falling Hours needs some serious work. It has three absolutely amazing tracks—as well as a real standout moment in the triple pinch harmonics at 4:50 in “No Shade of Gray”—but also a sea of indifferentiable riff-lunacy that ends up closer to cacophonous noise than anything else due to its lack of intricacy from inexperience.   

Recommended tracks: What Lies Beneath, Obstacles in Our Path, The Calm Before the Storm
You may also like: see FFO (but for real Bloody Cumshot, Equipoise, Deviant Process, The Beast of Nod, NYN, Aronious, Widow’s Peak, Soreption, Vomit the Hate, Replacire, Zemeth)
Final verdict: 5.5/10

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

Label: Enigmatic Diversity Records – Bandcamp

Somnium de Lycoris is:
– Mari (keyboards)
– Tomo (guitars)
– Iori (vocals)