Album art by Daphne Ang and Andrea Papi
Style: progressive metal, alternative metal, djent (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: System of a Down, Sleep Token, Jinjer, Oceans of Slumber
Country: UK
Release date: 01 November 2024
Being a blog focused on underground music, the quality of the promo materials we get can vary widely. Sometimes a band goes to the effort of constructing a full-on, lavishly written press release that explains the musical and lyrical drives behind their work in detail, and sometimes we just get a half-assed email saying “review this plz” with a link to some guy’s Google Drive folder. To their credit, UK-based duo The Chronicles of Manimal and Samara are decidedly in the former camp, with their professionally laid out press kit waxing rhapsodical about the themes of deeply felt loss and addiction that went into the lyrics, how they’ve made a barrier-breaking, fully DIY album full of unexpected yet melodic twists and turns. Combined with the eye-catching, impressionistically spacey cover art, I went into Origins hoping that it would be something truly special.
And then I hit play.
I didn’t know catfishing was a thing for albums, but here we are. Oh, it doesn’t start off too badly– while I’m not the biggest fan of spoken word narration, Daphne Ang’s voiceover in the first minute of “Feed the Beast” is crisp and well-delivered enough that I don’t mind it too much, even as it becomes taken over by electronic processing. But then a hideously clumsy barrage of leaden djent chugging barges in to slap the listener in the face, heralded by Andrea Papi’s inexcusably amateurish singing. His reedy tone isn’t even the worst part; he genuinely sounds out-of-key at points, erratically careening around each note without quite hitting any of them like the world’s luckiest drunk driver. To be fair, the band manages to mostly recover from that egregious misstep over the course of the song, with some halfway-decent melodies and atmospherics. Ang sings the chorus hook, and while she may be a bit anonymous-sounding, compared to the verse beforehand she might as well be Floor Jansen with her sheer level of vocal… competence. There are a few more bland bits of djent and some more rough vocals, but on the whole, it’s not irredeemable. It’s a bad sign when the spoken word parts of all things are the high points, but maybe this will be alright after all. Let’s see if the next track-
“Bite the Bullet” takes a hard turn towards trap music and hip-hop and is quite possibly the most heinously ill-advised song I’ve ever reviewed. To be clear, that’s not because of its swerve in genre; I try to keep an open mind towards the inclusion of more mainstream styles in my prog, even if they’re a bit out of left field, and I’m certainly not above bopping my head to a good rattling snare. Hell, I’m one of the biggest Sleep Token apologists on this site, for crying out loud! All that is to say that when I say this song blows chunks, it’s not because TCoMaS had the audacity to step outside the traditional boundaries of prog, but because they’re bad at it. Guest rapper Mr Meuri slurs his way through vague, unintelligible lyrics with an obnoxious, nasal tone of voice that somehow becomes worse in his adlibs, with his decently on-beat rhythm the only thing convincing me that they didn’t just pull some poor man off a street somewhere in Italy and force him to rap in English at gunpoint. The djent guitars come swinging back in for the… I guess it’s supposed to be a chorus, centering Papi’s harsh growls, which, to be fair, are better than his cleans, though the haphazard chugging and weirdly undermixed, out-of-place leads don’t exactly let the listener’s ears rest. To listen to this track is to be continually annoyed, either by the grating rap in the foreground or the weird, buzzing-mosquito guitars in the background.
Thankfully, the next few tracks avoid plunging down to that particular nadir, though they don’t exactly set the world on fire either. “Waves” rides through a smooth, slow burn of melancholic melody that escalates to loud melodeath riffs, kind of like the off-brand Temu version of Oceans of Slumber. Though its spoken-word section gets a bit edgy for my taste (“It FEELS. LIKE. HELL”), the overall effect lands pretty well, and the roaring outro contains Papi’s most convincing growls by a fair margin. “Per Astra” is a keyboard-led ballad almost entirely helmed by Ang, and, perhaps coincidentally, it’s the best song on the album. Though the vocal layering could have done with some more polish, on the whole the piano and melodies are rather pretty, the spoken word sections are striking, and the electronic parts incorporate trap percussion far more organically than the hip-hop abortion two songs prior. Finally, “Mysterium Tremendum” attempts to wrap all the band’s many facets (minus the rapping, thankfully) into one big ol’ bow, and while the final result is a bit of a disjointed riff-salad mess in terms of songwriting, I do appreciate the level of ambition on display in arranging a full orchestral section; it really adds texture to the atmospheric narration.
But just when the taste of bile had been mostly washed out of my mouth, in comes the closer “It goes”– an apropos title, so long as “it” refers to my goddamn patience. Impressive almost, given the song’s only two and a half minutes long. This is another ballad, but this time it leans solely upon the clean vocal “talents” of one Andrea Papi, with only an acoustic guitar and some cellos to back him up. Even the guitars end up going out of tune midway through somehow, as if his kidney-stone-passing moans cast a dark hex upon any instruments in their presence, cursing their victims to be just as hideously atonal as they are. While “Bite the Bullet” sucked in a fascinating, unique way, this one is just a banal, painfully amateurish form of lame.
Honestly, having listened to Origins in full, it somehow makes the duo’s heartfelt writings on its deep meanings feel less sincere, less coherent. It’s all well and good to say that your record is “for the people who are still here, and for those who are now gone” on your press copy; I can nod along to that while I read. But the more I’m subjected to its wildly inconsistent vocal work, compositional fumbles, and incomprehensible production that makes its programmed drums sound like they’re covered in pillows and radio static, the more it all starts to feel hollow. Oh, sure, you can go on about how “personal” and “written from the heart” your album is, but every listen breeds more and more distaste and skepticism of those words, turning them into baseless, meaningless puffery. The lyrics would be salvageable by a good enough tune, but the tunes on display here make them stand in stark relief as rotely rhymed pablum of roughly the quality I would expect if I told Chat GPT to “write me lyrics to a dark prog song about depression”. Sure, there are a couple bright spots to be found in the softer atmospherics, but when your heartfelt, emotional album makes me less sympathetic to said emotions through listening to it, you have utterly failed. This is one chronicle I won’t be following further.
Recommended tracks: Waves, Per Astra
You may also like: Madder Mortem, Uncomfortable Knowledge, the spoken word parts of I Häxa maybe?
Final verdict: 3/10
Related links: Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page
The Chronicles of Manimal and Samara is:
– Daphne Ang (vocals, keyboards)
– Andrea Papi (vocals, guitars, bass, drum programming)
with:
– Mr Meuri (rap vocals on “Bite the Bullet”)
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