Style: instrumental prog rock/metal, djent, electronica, jazz fusion (instrumental)
Recommended for fans of: Vildhjarta, Animals as Leaders, Plini, Tigran Hamasyan, The Comet Is Coming
Country: Germany
Release date: 15 December 2023
I’m tired. It’s the end of the year after a tough semester; I’ve heard well over a thousand albums in 2023; and December music release quality has drastically plummeted from the rest of the strong last quarter. Out of the slim pickings, Christopher forced upon me Art Against Agony’s fourth LP, the double album Sound of Inevitability, and it’s painful to review, both endlessly long and poorly produced, the two biggest hurdles for repeated listening. I hardly feel creative enough to adequately roast this when I could be refining my top ten of the year list, but I’ll do what I can.
Art Against Agony are’t a typical band, however. No, they are a full on artistic collective, fusing hack philosophy, photography, videography, and performance art along with their music. All members wear goofy masks and put on stage names including: The Sorcerer, The Maximalist, The Twin, The Void, The Linq, and The Pun. The mask gimmick has been wearing thin for a decade at this point (Slipknot, Ghost, now Sleep Token), and the insufferability that comes through their philosophy writing on their site rubs me the wrong way, even as a fan of pretension. Also, The Sorcerer’s nipple is out in the band picture, and that alone ought to be an automatic point deduction—wtf, I didn’t consent to that.
Over the course of ninety-five minutes, Art Against Agony wears many faces: instrumental prog metal, djent, electronica, jazz fusion; unfortunately, none of them are worn particularly well. Often the creative collective stumbles across cool ideas—“She Who Thirsts” is the first of them with its interesting percussive line, with The Maximalist being a dedicated mridangam (a type of ancient percussion instrument) player and the best performer across the album—but even those ideas shortly transition into uninspired djent (who could’ve guessed with a song title like “At the Djentist”) or inappropriately abused electronica. Except for the focused electronica-focused tracks “Squirrel (бабник edit)” and “Salience Bias” which are much more engaging with their involved use of synths—with classic prog electronica arpeggiation fashion for the former and with modern IDM inspired beats in the latter—Art Against Agony abuses the synth by fusing it in a lackluster way with the metal elements, formlessly thrown in as a texture in the soggy mix. When focused on one (non djent) style, Sound of Inevitability is more convincing, but it’s a bit of a catch twenty-two since the genre switching is the one thing keeping the album at all engaging. Art of Agony needs to figure out what they do best and stick to that: I suggest sticking with the Tigran Hamasyan-esque polyrhythms and figuring out what works from there.
However, Art of Agony have trouble keeping focus, and forays into jazz fusion and prog metal frequently fall flat, feeling like either uninspired Animals as Leaders ripoffs or just an unconfident, genre-questioning mess. All of these flaws are exacerbated by the production stifling Sound of Inevitability, stiff and electronica-centric. The digitized sound can pass with djent, but for the jazz fusion sections—or worse yet, the creative flute sections—the organic sound of the guitars clashes negatively with the inorganic beats underneath. Moreover, while the percussion is typically interesting and varied with a strong emphasis on polyrhythms, the guitarists simply aren’t up to snuff to play at the virtuosic level required for jazz fusion and prog metal; they try to keep up, but the entire project sounds extremely amateurish with the overly electronic production the cherry on top (I dislike maraschino cherries for the record). Moreover, the production is inconsistent between tracks, the tones and relative volumes of the assorted instruments often changing. Nu-jazz artists like George Clanton, Berlioz, and The Comet Is Coming are all successful mixes of jazz and electronica, and other artists like Tigran and even Animals as Leaders make strong arguments for the validity of these genre bends, but Art Against Agony don’t stand up to any comparisons.
While Art Against Agony do make several attempts to be creative beyond arbitrary borders, perhaps none more engaging than the flute/jazz fusion/djent/electronica combo in “Hindsight Bias,” the project also doesn’t have nearly enough creativity or variety to justify subjecting the listener to anywhere close to ninety minutes of this, especially as a completely instrumental project: I’m sick of listening to Sound of Inevitability by the halfway point. The lack of unified sound makes the sprawling album all the more arduous to suffer through. I appreciate a lot of what Art Against Agony try to do when they switch genres and with their percussion style especially, but then they immediately go back to mediocre Animals as Leaders pastiche, inconsistent electronica, or any of the other failed experiments. Over and over—a lot of overs since its ninety-five hecking minutes long—this album frustrates me with a decent idea poorly executed. Now I’m gonna take a nap.
Recommended tracks: She Who Thirsts, Hindsight Bias, His Daughter’s Eyes
You may also like: Culak, The Dark Atom, Contemplation & Chrono.Fixion
Final verdict: 3/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram
Label: independent
Art Against Agony is:
– The Sorcerer (guitars)
– The Maximalist (mridangam)
– The Twin (bass)
– The Void (guitars)
– The Linq (drums)
– The Pun (drums)
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