Art by Aaron Pinto
Style: Progressive death metal, technical death metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Alkaloid, Obscura, Devin Townsend, Morbid Angel, Yes
Country: Germany
Release date: 25 April, 2025
When Yes released Tales From Topographic Oceans in 1973, it proved that progressive rock could progress no further. With an even more difficult recording process than Close to the Edge, Tales saw Yes try to make lightning strike twice, and became tangled within Anderson and Howe’s grand vision of an entire album full of epics. Problem was, everyone could only hear a four-minute Hammond organ solo so many times before it got stale. The genre had been swallowed up by its own ambition, ever gluttonous to add more runtime and weird instruments to their songs. Once the kings of prog rock fell, it wasn’t long before everyone got with the times and became more accessible, or died off. Tales is ambitious to say the least, and ambition can be a double-edged sword. Without proper balancing, or some central idea to keep things grounded, concepts can very easily spiral out of control.
Tom “Fountainhead” Geldschläger is responsible for Obscura’s most ambitious effort. The fifteen-minute ‘Weltseele’ sees the band at by far their most experimental, adding in Eastern influences and a string quintet, closing out the album Akroasis in classic prog style. Now, he makes his triumphant return to the scene almost ten years later with Changeling. The band’s self-titled debut promises all the shredding solos, double-stopped riffs, and batshit insane virtuosity Fountainhead is known for. Realistically, I knew a musician as prolific as he would have no trouble navigating such a massive project (just look at the Bandcamp credits!), but part of me did wonder about an hour-long tech-death album becoming cursed by its own sprawl and ambition. What I didn’t know was that Fountainhead had a secret weapon up his sleeve, one I never thought the fretless guitar shredder would be so keen to exercise on his path to success: restraint.
Allow me to detour for just a moment to let you in on a little secret. Archspire, the band known for writing songs at 400 BPM, exercise excessive restraint. Rhythmically, they write simple riffs and play them inhumanly fast eighty percent of the time, which then allows them to blast off and legato-tap all around the fretboard when the need arises, making it all the more impactful. Conceptually similar, Changeling employs another kind of restraint: letting sections repeat, progress, and evolve patiently, until a track feels epic and monumental. Complexity comes through evolution rather than the incessant sweep-picking and shredding one might expect from such a strong tech-death cast.
Like an ever-changing alien species, Changeling’s song structure always begins at a larval phase. The simple, four-note guitar riff that starts ‘Instant Results’ is brought back as screams from a woman’s choir during the song’s climactic drop. One highlight of my many listens, ‘World? What World?’ is almost entirely based around the acoustic riff that starts it off. It evolves throughout the song’s runtime, bridging distorted guitars and becoming part of the undergird horn section right before each chorus. Similarly, the masterful, pant-shittingly heavy chorus of ‘Abyss’ follows much of the same structure, adding a higher harmony the second time around, and letting vocalist Morean produce the lowest note of his career on the last. It’s the subtle changes in repeating motifs and ideas that set Changeling apart from its peers. Not only is it great to catch a repeated line upon first listen, but subsequent listens reveal those larval forms each song has grown from. Even ‘Anathema’, in all its seventeen-minute glory, is composed of a mere few sections that are repurposed throughout. As Morean’s shouts of “Forever!” close the track with an increasingly heavy breakdown, I can’t believe the song is as long as it is. The track never plods in one place, and like everything else on the album, it finds a way to make reprisals work and flow without sounding like Fountainhead was running out of ideas.
Despite the massive amount of guest credits on this album, I’d be hard pressed to call it “symphonic”. The orchestral elements are ever-present, but provide more of a textural padding until the last two songs. Instead of being shoved in my face à la Wilderun, they’re low-key and usually underneath the many layers each song holds. This showing of restraint makes the moments the orchestral elements appear all the more special, like when ‘Abdication’ begins more like a Joe Hisashi piece than it does a death metal song. Even the fretless guitar, Fountainhead’s signature, doesn’t take center stage for most of the album. As a composer, he realizes there can be too much of a good thing, and having a wanky, fretless guitar solo on every song would cheapen the effect; the same is true of using symphonic elements with too heavy of a hand. The metal parts themselves can stand just fine without an orchestral backing to make them interesting, with sections like the tribal break in ‘Changeling’ feeling naturally interwoven for the song’s benefit, having been reprised from the song’s choral lines.
Likewise, the songs don’t feel fluffy. At one hour, Changeling is practically devoid of filler, with even the interludes being interesting segues into their following pieces. The four core members alone seemingly provide endless layers to uncover in each track. Arran McSporran (Virvum) is a well-known monster on the fart bass, and even he knows when to stop shredding and follow the rhythms beset by kit-master Mike Heller (ex-Fear Factory, Malignancy). The two execute rhythmic precision in tandem, with Heller backing many of the orchestral sections with jazz-infused beats and McSporran allowing these moments to shine just before yet another tasteful bass solo. The ending of ‘Abyss’ sees the two almost completely drop out, with the drums playing a simple two-note beat as distorted, doom metal guitars take hold and devour. Special mention goes to Morean, with his harshes being the most intelligible I’ve heard since Mikael Åkerfeldt in his prime. I came away from my first listen with so many of his vocal lines stuck firmly in my head, and I was shocked by how many I remembered upon the second. The chorus on ‘Anathema’ has been practically drilled into my brain, only helped by the short reprisal about five minutes in with a backing horn ensemble. This is all wrapped up tightly in Fountainhead’s fantastic production job, with every instrument remaining audible even when the entire band is blasting off at 300 BPM. The distorted guitars cut like a dagger, and McSporran’s bass sits comfortably between them along with Heller’s thunderous, jackhammer drums.
The one small nitpick I can give is that some of the transitions feel a little strange. ‘Instant Results’ ends on a fadeout just as guest guitarist Jason Goebel (ex-Cynic) is getting jazzy, and the intro to ‘Changeling’ is almost intentionally jarring coming from ‘Metanoia Interlude’. These are, of course, rather small in the grand scheme of how the album plays out. There isn’t a major complaint I can make about Changeling other than the fact that it ends.
Prog, despite everything, seems to still have places to go. Changeling is unlike any of its peers, skirting the obvious Alkaloid and Obscura comparisons by injecting clever, restrained songwriting into its DNA. The first minute of ‘Instant Results’ fools you into thinking this is run-of-the-mill, space-y tech death, and then proceeds to backhand you with forward-thinking compositions for the rest of its runtime. Every moment of Changeling left me wowed by its genuine creativity. Akin to Orgone’s Pleroma, my AOTY of 2024, this feels like an album that took years of blood, sweat, and tears to create. The compositions, like the tendrils of some unknowable Outer God, snake their way through section after section, all while keeping the listeners grounded with grand choruses and reprisals that feel earned. Changeling have avoided the trappings of prog stereotypes every step of the way and come out victorious, paragons of what the genre in its purest form was meant to be. A testament to human innovation and skill, Changeling is the merging of multiple musical worlds to see one unified vision.
Recommended tracks: Instant Results, World? What World?, Falling in Circles, Abyss, Changeling, Anathema, Abdication
You may also like: Obsidious, Afterbirth, Horrendous, Tomarum, Dessiderium, An Abstract Illusion
Final verdict: 9.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram
Seasons of Mist: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website
Changeling is:
– Tom “Fountainhead” Geldschläger (guitars, oud, keyboard)
– Mike Heller (Drums)
– Arran McSporran (Fretless bass)
– Morean (Vocals)
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