Style: Progressive metal, alternative metal, djent, electropop (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: HAKEN LEPROUS CALIGULA’S HORSE (also VOLA, Sleep Token, and Voyager)
Country: Norway
Release date: 21 June 2024
[Editor’s note: while this band has exceeded our 20k monthly listener cap on Spotify, they were only at 9k when we picked them up so blame Sam’s lazy ass for not writing faster.]
The /r/progmetal subreddit is a funny (by that I mean frustrating) place. Recommendation thread after recommendation thread will fly by and what do you see? HAKEN, LEPROUS, CALIGULA’S HORSE. Really, the context doesn’t matter. Want something heavy but dynamic like Opeth? Caligula’s Horse is heavy and dynamic! Want something with epic power metal vibes like Symphony X or Pagan’s Mind? Caligula’s Horse is pretty epic! Want something avant-garde and/or boundary pushing? Well have you considered the innovators in CALIGULA’S FUCKING HORSE?! After a while the community started joking that Jim Grey secretly paid Redditors to shill his band. Of course, each of these threads also has a Haken and a Leprous suggestion in there somewhere even if completely irrelevant to what was requested. What’s the point of this intro you ask? Well, the subject of today’s review, Rendezvous Point, fit right in with this crowd. YES, THEIR MUSIC IS ACTUALLY LIKE CALIGULA’S. FUCKING. HORSE.
To Rendezvous Point’s credit, my intro was a tad misplaced, because a) they actually share Baard Kolstad with Leprous on drums instead of any C-Horse-powered musician, and b) I just wanted to vent. Musically though, Dream Chaser is smooth and djenty, grooving as slickly as someone who subjects their scalp to half a liter of hair product each day abetted by a production as clean as the house of someone suffering from mysophobia. Add a lick of Euro/electro-pop paint for which I am too much of a musical hermit to know the specifics of, and you more or less have the recipe for Dream Chaser.
The biggest standout on Dream Chaser is Geirmund Hansen, whose vocal performance is striking even among pop singers. His sultry tone is admittedly not quite my vibe, but it fits the aesthetic well, and he shows impressive stylistic variety, ranging from emotional vulnerability shown on the opener “Don’t Look Up” and its Piano Break of Sadness™, to the floating ethereal melodies that supplement the gentle tapping of “Fireflies,” to the explosiveness of “Oslo Syndrome” or the chorus of “The Tormented”—a song which also plays around with some nifty vocoder effects—to even just casual well-constructed vocal melodies. The only vocal quality he doesn’t really display that I would have liked to see is some grit and/or rawness, but that is more of a preference gripe than anything wrong with Gerimund’s singing, and likely wouldn’t have fit the album’s sanitized aesthetic anyway (note to self: stop expecting everything to be power metal ya dumbass).
Instrumentally, Rendezvous Point keep things generally interesting from a prog perspective despite the poppy song structures. Having Baard Kolstad on drums is of course as close to a guarantee for success you’ll get in that department, but on Dream Chaser it is rather Petter Hallaråker on guitars and Nicolay Svennæs on keys whom I find most impressive, layering on an impeccable sense of rhythmicality and sound design. Baard on the other hand plays mostly supportive and keeps his fills almost solely in service of the riffs and synth melodies. I do miss him showing off a little, but his laid back approach allows sonic space for the other instruments to dance around his grooves with independent rhythmic lines, turning Dream Chaser into a real polyrhythmic extravaganza.
But as tight as Rendezvous Point are, poppy song structures like this can only get you so far on a prog blog. Dream Chaser is only thirty-seven minutes spread out over eight songs, showing little in way of ambitious songwriting. None of these songs are bad, but I rarely find myself amazed at any point either. Only “Still Water” goes for an epic approach to its writing with its increasingly grandiose cinematic synths that culminate in triumphant strings and thunderous, slowed down drumming that almost feels like doom metal. Moreover, the slick djenty grooves feel jarringly uniform in tempo until the final two songs where they slow down a little. I could have used a higher tempo track or two and the slower, doomy vibes of “Still Water” spread out more evenly across the album.
Although poppy djent-prog has been relatively played out over the years, Rendezvous Point’s playing and songwriting skills put them at the forefront of the movement. Most of my qualms with Dream Chaser are inherent to the style they play in, which I imagine those who are already a fan of this style won’t have any issues with. Nevertheless, I would be very curious to see what Rendezvous Point would come up with should they ever decide to try something more ambitious like Caligula’s Horse did with Charcoal Grace earlier in the year so they can truly win over the fans of HAKEN LEPROUS CALIGULA’S HORSE.
Recommended tracks: Don’t Look Up, Presence, Still Water
You may also like: Ihlo, Ions, Temic, Effuse
Final verdict: 7/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page
Label: Long Branch Records – Bandcamp | Facebook
Rendezvous Point is:
– Geirmund Hansen (vocals)
– Petter Hallaråker (guitars)
– Nicolay Tangen Svennæs (keyboards)
– Gunn-Hilde Erstad (bass)
– Baard Kolstad (drums)
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