Style: Progressive metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Between the Buried and Me, The Offering, Nevermore, Scar Symmetry
Country: Texas, USA
Release date: 16 August 2024
You know what novel is overrated? Frankenstein. I’m sorry, Shelley stans, but I found it turgid and overly self-piteous. I know it was written in the ‘year without a summer’ (alongside Byron’s apocalyptic epic Darkness) but come on, things weren’t that bad. And yet, I respect the hell out of that book because it birthed an entire genre, and its central ideas are baked into our culture: that man should not play god, but that if we do then we owe a duty of care to that which we create. However, there’s another, simpler lesson in Frankenstein, one which many a prog band would do well to heed: stitching a bunch of bits together doesn’t make a consummate whole; it might even make a monster.
Texas trio Framing Skeleton’s songwriting approach on third album Misery Prelude: The Prince Eternal is similar to the scattershot style of early Between the Buried and Me, borrowing the band’s theatrics, too, but their sound is rooted in something a little more on the 2000s melodeath to metalcore spectrum; shades of The Offering (particularly in Jeremy Burke’s powerful vocal performance which also recalls a young James Hetfield), Trivium, and even Insomnium rear their head at times, their eclecticism making it hard to pin them down to any one sound. For example, “Blood Sport I: First Loser” showcases gothic flavours with its ticking synths and bold piano chords, while “Blood Sport II: Starvation” recalls the lascivious industrialised nu metal of Korn. Indeed, those two tracks showcase Framing Skeletons at their most successful even if the genre variability speaks to the overall disunity of their style. Elsewhere, however, there are problems.
We start with a bizarre pacing issue: the first four tracks of the album are comprised of one twelve minute instrumental suite, the first of which is an overture of impressively uninteresting riffs from the album to come. At least the overture serves a purpose, the other three tracks feel completely superfluous—the spoken word in “III. Euphoria’s Requiem” could be important to the album’s story, but it’s a struggle to hear in the mix, and the playing on these tracks doesn’t really represent the talents of the band. Couple all this with the fact that Misery Prelude… is seventy-five minutes long, and we’re spending over a sixth of the album’s runtime on what is essentially a perfectly serviceable but hardly mind-blowing warm-up routine.
Things improve when we get to the album proper: “Altruistic City” opens so energetically that it feels like we’ve entered a different album altogether. Drummer Bryan Holub’s pulsating drum performance kicks things into a higher gear, and Burke’s distinctive, raspy cleans offer a melodic throughline. He genuinely impresses with harshes inspired by but stronger than Tommy Giles, and is willing to take risks, such as the Leprous-esque operatics on the opening of “Walking Crown” or the eerily harmonised a cappella on “Specter of Origin”. The only problem is in the mixing of multiple vocal layers, which often sound ill-blended and, as a result, a little pitchy relative to one another. Nevertheless, from “Altruistic City” to “Blood Sport II: Starvation” a strong run of tracks dominate; by no means perfect—“Reflections of the Deathless” speaks to the ongoing and baffling affinity that prog bands have for marigolds—but a great improvement on the instrumental openers.
However, as we get further in the album we get more Proggy™, and it’s on these longer tracks that Framing Skeletons really lose focus. An impressive flamenco section on “Walking Crown” is pleasingly well-integrated into the overall track, but a second flamenco section that sojourns into full-on samba on “Chrysalis” comes across as more gimmicky and simply doesn’t feel contextualised within the wider song. “Chrysalis” especially begins to wander through so many sections that it becomes hard to follow the thread, and “The Vault” epitomises the issue: a succession of riffs and licks that are great in isolation but don’t feel meaningfully connected, just a jarring progression of sonic non-sequiturs. However, overcoming their attention deficit doesn’t always work out either: the thirteen minute epic “Specter of my Origin” closes with ninety seconds of a single chant, the relief when it’s over quashed by a lovely but totally unnecessary piano coda. By the latter stretches of the album, every new section starts to feel like it’s only there to spite the listener.
The production is as much of a farrago as everything else: the mix is solid if somewhat lo-fi and, for want of a better term, nineties sounding. While the drums are a little too loud in the mix, the snare verging on St. Anger levels of annoyance at some junctures, Ethan Berry’s bass is nicely audible and the instruments and vocals are mostly well cared for. There’s also the aforementioned pitchiness in some of the mixing of multiple vocal layers: on “Blood Sport I: First Loser” they let the song down, on “Blood Sport II: Starvation” the vocal mixing is great.
Framing Skeletons are clearly very talented performers and, stylistically, Misery Prelude: The Prince Eternal is a concatenation of things that probably shouldn’t work as well together as they often do. However, the Frankensteinian stitching together of so many ideas leads to bloated songs in an album that’s both less than the sum of its parts and unjustifiably long. It’s a strange contradiction to find oneself enjoying so many aspects of an album and yet feeling so constantly pushed away by its many flaws, but with some polish and focus to put meat on their bones, Framing Skeletons could go far.
Recommended tracks: Walking Crown, Blood Sport II: Starvation
You may also like: Apeiron Bound, Witherfall, Into Eternity
Final verdict: 5.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram
Label: Independent
Framing Skeletons is:
– Jeremy Burke – guitars, vocals
– Bryan Holub – drums, backing vocals
– Ethan Berry – bass, backing vocals
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