Genres: Progressive Metal, Djent (Mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Haken, Devin Townsend, Periphery, Between the Buried and Me
Country: Sweden
Review by: Christopher (with Zach as a consultant)
Release date: 15 March, 2024
I love it when a band includes homages to their influences; think of the solo to Haken’s “The Architect” (at 10:17) where the band include a lovely little nod to Opeth’s “The Drapery Falls”. Or take Wilderun who insert a brilliantly artful reference, also to Opeth, lifting the acoustic intro from “To Bid You Farewell” at the beginning of “Distraction I”—an inspired move given Epigone meditates deeply on the artistic process—a musical meta-joke about influence, pastiche and originality.
Which brings us neatly to Benjamin Almö Thorsell, formerly a member of Frozen Realm, and his debut solo full-length under the moniker ALMO. I say “solo”, but Thorsell had help, and I don’t mean the couple of guest appearances. Devin Townsend, Between the Buried and Me, Periphery, some Tesseract, and a little band called Haken suffuse Reconciliation to a degree that flirts dangerously with that thin line between homage and having Roger Waters write a song about wanting to break your fingers1. I don’t know what the best thing to do in this situation is, legally speaking, but I recommend Thorsell finds out.
Sometimes you hear an album and you know you’re going to need help, so for ALMO’s Reconciliation I enlisted the expertise of r/bigtiddygothgf subscriber, self-proclaimed Professional Riffologist™, and fellow Subway reviewer, Zach. The problem was, I knew I’d heard so many of these melodies before but I was struggling to place them. Zach, however, can identify a familiar motif from fifty paces, and a Kia Soul from the noise it makes as it collides with his ribcage.
Thorsell’s a multi-instrumentalist and handles all instruments and vocals. He has range, his cleans sounding like a less whiny Spencer Sotello while his harshes hold shades of Spencer, Tommy Giles, and even some Devin. Complex djent riffs define much of Reconciliation with huge synths and a tendency towards Devin Townsend’s wall of sound production style layered over the top. The drums are all programmed, I believe, and a little too loud in the mix, but mostly everything here is done well, with a solid mix and production. So far, so prog metal.
But something tickles at the ears whilst listening to Reconciliation. You know these riffs and melodies, you’ve heard them before. Some stood out clear as a bell, such as the end of “PANIC ATTACK!!!” which quite literally just does “Poltergeist” by Devin Townsend, or the Haken madrigal section lifted off the top of The Mountain in “Reconciliation”. Zach’s superior knowledge helped me to identify all the Haken, Periphery and Between the Buried and Me quotations to really dig into all the… let’s call them “homages”. What we ended up with was a list as long as the history of copyright infringement lawsuits in the music industry.
At his most inspired, Thorsell sounds like a man who really likes Haken, Between the Buried and Me, Devin Townsend, and Periphery. And that’s fine, a man’s gotta have influences. Zach insisted I mention Omnerod (and I rarely need an excuse); The Amensal Rise, my album of the year for 2023, clearly sounds like a band influenced by Devin Townsend, Between the Buried and Me and old Leprous. But, crucially, it never sounds like it’s ripping off any of those artists—they take those influences and create something fresh with them. Thorsell can play his arse off—he’s an extremely talented musician—but I can’t tell whether he’s aware that he wrote very few actual riffs on this album. Either Thorsell has created the densest musical Easter egg hunt ever or he’s the sort of person you read about in an Oliver Sacks collection—The Man Who Mistook His Haken Medley For An Original Composition.
I’m not going to recite the whole list of charges, but let’s talk about the closing title track. Do you like the Haken track “Crystallised”? Because Thorsell sure as hell does. Whilst that particular epic makes up around 50% of “Reconciliation’s” sonic DNA, “Messiah Complex” is also repeatedly invoked, as is the aforementioned The Mountain-esque madrigal section, as well as “Cockroach King” and “Initiate”. At one point, the riff from “White Walls” by Between the Buried and Me turns up virtually unchanged, as does a riff from “Utopia” by Tesseract. Meanwhile, the general Townsendian vibe mercifully never becomes overt enough to pin down to a track title but it lingers throughout. Granted it’s a twenty minute long epic but still, that’s far too much “homage” for one song and the rest of Reconciliation is just as egregious: “Bliss” lifts from “Crystallised” (Thorsell really likes that song) so flagrantly that it upset Zach. I had to give him some warm milk, feed him some sushi, and play him some Afterbirth to get him to sleep that night.
I’ve listened multiple times now and the pastiche is so continuous and blatant. Thorsell tells us upfront these are his influences, not that he could ever hide it, and having influences is fine—but lifting riffs and melodies like this is a bold choice to say the least. And if Thorsell’s confident enough to release Reconciliation into the world then I’m going to have to review it as I hear it. Thorsell doesn’t wear his influences on his sleeve so much as he’s woven them into an Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat2 with matching slacks and hat. This is the work of an unabashed prog nerd but I’m not sure to what end, apart from possibly a courtroom.
All this makes it very hard to say what ALMO actually sounds like. Can a band claim to have an identity when their sound is four genre titans stacked on one another’s shoulders wearing a Technicolour trenchcoat? The thing is, I really quite like Reconciliation. Thorsell is clearly a talented performer and weaving together the sounds of four such pantheonic prog bands into a consummate whole is no easy feat, but do I like ALMO or do I just like Devin, Haken, BTBAM and Periphery? We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: if you spend too much time citing your influences, you’ll encourage your listeners to go and listen to those classics again rather than you. If you spend time actually quoting your influences, people might start making phone calls. And if your aim is to pay tribute to your favourite bands by repeatedly invoking them then you need to make that very clear. For your own sake, not the audience’s.
Is Reconciliation actionable in a court of law? Possibly. Is Thorsell going to make enough money off it for it to be worth a lawsuit? No. Would any band bother? Probably not, and it’d be a little lame if they did. Do I want Thorsell to be sued? Not at all, but listening to this album makes me a bit nervous for him. The bizarre thing is he’s a talented musician: he sings and plays the hell out of Reconciliation, he just contributed strangely few of his own ideas to it. There’s a fine line between pastiche and plagiarism. Please, Benjamin, take the advice of your favourite band: take one step back from your influences, and maybe you can take two leaps forward. And with bated breath we wait…
Recommended tracks: Vilsen, PANIC ATTACK!!!, Reconciliation
You may also like: Monolith Zero, Spheres
Final verdict: 6/10
- Roger Waters famously asserted that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” ripped off the Pink Floyd track “Echoes” but quipped that “life’s too long to bother with suing Andrew fucking Lloyd Webber”. Instead, Waters took out his revenge in the song “It’s A Miracle” which mostly grapples with brand hegemony worldwide in the late capitalist era. However, the final lines take a turn: “We cower in our shelters/With our hands over our ears/Lloyd-Webber’s awful stuff/Runs for years and years and years/An earthquake hits the theatre/But the operetta lingers/Then the piano lid comes down/And breaks his fucking fingers/It’s a miracle.”
↩︎ - Fuck you, Andrew Lloyd Webber. ↩︎
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram
Label: Independent
ALMO is:
– Benjamin Almö Thorsell (vocals)
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