Style: progressive rock, progressive metal, avant-garde rock, avant-garde metal (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Therion, Devil Doll, Ayreon, David Maxim Micic, Earthside, Trans-Siberian Orchestra
Country: Romania
Review by: Vince
Release date: 4 April 2025
Prose is the gravity by which stories anchor their readers. Cool concepts or complex characters won’t survive if the foundation upon which they rest—this voice—betrays them. After all, how can we engage with possible depths and merits if we can’t keep our feet on the ground long enough to dig? Concept albums are not dissimilar from books: They are built around character, drama, themes and, ultimately, a story complete with beginning, middle, and end. Music and lyrics provide the gravity. Or, possibly, a lack thereof.
Enter, our subject: Telluric Inharmonies, the sophomore full-length from Romanian avant-garde-ians, Hteththemeth. Their Bandcamp promo announces “70+ minutes of … an epic multilingual story … filled with dramatic progressive metal, intense spoken word passages, [and] dynamic musical shifts.” For fans who’ve patiently been champing at the bit (it’s been nine years since debut Best Worst Case Scenario), no doubt these words evoke great excitement. For this first-timer, it’s enough to get my boots on the ground, but will Hteththemeth be able to keep me there?
“A!” sets us amidst the soothing crash of waves and brief narration in Romanian, the intro establishing its narrative intentions swiftly. War horns and epic chanting follow before breaking against a swirly, synth-baked passage, where we get our first taste of the album’s multilingual voice. “Why the guilty one does not pay for his sins?” our narrator beseeches God. I feel my feet leaving the ground. “It’s only the intro,” I remind myself. Rough starts do not always beget rough journeys. However, as I dug deeper into Telluric Inharmonies, I found my lactose intolerance flaring up something fierce.
I’ve switched analogies, I know. We’re talking cheese now.
Normally, I’m rather fond(ue) of the dairy industrial complex—I grew up on a healthy diet of Euro-power and symphonic metal during my formative years and am no stranger to the endearing cheesiness prog occasionally orbits. Goofy lyrics can be forgiven if the music slaps hard enough, and it’s here Hteththemeth fights to anchor the listener: the instrumentation is often engaging, providing swells of dramatic heft and grandiose compositions that bring to mind some of the neoclassical verve and operatic aspirations of 90s-era Savatage (“The Fools and Failed Queens”), while elsewhere tinkling post-rock guitar lines buried beneath crunchy rhythms reward deeper listening (“Honest Lies,” “The Odyssey of Nothing”). And whenever vocalist Lao Kreegan slips into Romanian, it rolls with a naturalism and strength that begins to restore gravity. However…
Most of the album is performed in English, a decision which infects the proceedings with levels of unintended awkwardness that unmoored me constantly. This reaches its unfortunate apotheosis on the beguiling “I Buy Her Presence,” sounding like a violent collision of indie-folk and a direly chipper anime outro. It’s a jarring inclusion which feels alien amidst the baroque splendor of “The Fools and Failed Queens” or the Distant Dream-esque post-prog explorations of “The Odyssey of Nothing.” Elsewhere and everywhere, the spoken word passages bookending every proper song commit frequent violence upon the album’s flow, halting momentum constantly while providing little value to the overall experience. Only the intro (“A!”) and outro (“O!”) feel vital, with the latter’s sonic callbacks to the former propagating the idea of a narrative—even if the multilingual approach and discordant tracklisting offer no real sense of a cohesive journey. Thus, Inharmonies feels, well… lacking harmony as a whole.
That said, Telluric Inharmonies is not a bad record, per se. The music is full of lively movements and a fair share of emotive storytelling buoyed by a light and airy production, empowering much of the charm and whimsy encapsulated within. (Codrut ‘Codrez’ Costea’s drumming is of particular merit throughout). Despite my criticism of the lyrics and their delivery, Kreegan himself is a fine vocalist when anchored in the right places. His voice is colorful and able to conjure earworm melodies with frightening ease, with the storytelling gusto needed to match the theatricality of the music. Though his experiments don’t always pay off, I applaud his fearlessness when it comes to pushing comforts. Were the English lyrics to be tightened up or switched to Romanian entirely, I would endorse a future release without hesitation; such is Kreegan’s ability to impart feeling through the texture of his voice that I feel little would be lost in the (non-)translation.
Hteththemeth is a talented crew with the potential to whip up a tasty musical morsel. Sadly, Telluric Inharmonies’ voice presents a foundation too uneven for this reviewer to stand on, despite the album’s undeniable charisma and creative outreach. Those with a higher tolerance for the ol’ lyrical cheddar may find themselves more than sated by this second serving, but for my money I’ll have to send it back to the kitchen.
Final verdict: 5/10
Review by: Andy
Let it be known: ambition is never overlooked here at the Subway. Romanian act Hteththemeth’s new album Telluric Inharmonies was independently bookmarked by not one, not two, but three of our authors (because we’re incapable of using the search function on our spreadsheet), and the project is a behemoth. A seventy-minute, twenty-one track, multi-language concept album, Telluric Inharmonies is intimidating to approach; exacerbating the matter, Hteththemeth call their style “unhuman music,” and I’m human, so I don’t even know if I’m legally allowed to listen. Alas, for such an over-the-top project, one of us had to review it out of principle, and I drew the short end of the straw.
So what does unhuman music sound like, anyway? Well, it’s surprisingly human, replete with one-note vocals, your average djent-y guitar parts, and keys to provide “atmosphere” that really do not much at all. The track title of “The Odyssey of Nothing” is a self-fulfilling prophecy for the whole project. Telluric Inharmonies is vapid, poorly paced, boring, and unimaginative. I knew I was in for the long haul when the first track “A!” did precisely nada for over four minutes—bland ambience and spoken word, aside. We have those in spades across Telluric Inharmonies with around twenty minutes of pointless interludes. Sandwiched between pretty much every “real” song on the album, the interludes absolutely kill any momentum Hteththemeth manage to build up. For instance, “Li(f)e” hints at a climax of sorts through its djenty outro, but then “A Șasea Zi” decides a full minute and a half of spoken word is the right call; spoiler alert, it has never been the right call on any album ever in the history of albums.
So let’s ignore the twenty minutes of pointless filler and focus on the meatier parts, shall we? The heavier hitting tracks are just plain weird, but not in an “unhuman” way, more in a “why would you mix djent with a dance music flavor with repetitive vocal lines” way. Despite the djent-y aspect of the guitars, the music never really gets heavy at all, instead opting for a sort of liminal state in between generic prog rock and metal, just aimless chugging riffs with no bite—we’ve all heard the type of amorphous style Hteththemeth plays. However, the guest cellist and pianist are quite lovely when they’re utilized, providing a more mature sound to the project than the synthesized djent; in fact, the compositions can be rather beautiful (“I Wanted You All,” “The Poetry of Failure,” “Adoriel Is Watching”). When Hteththemeth write honest-to-god songs and not dumb interludes, particularly with professional instrumentalists, they achieve far more than they do when they try to stretch themselves to be weird and unhuman—that always manifests as them trying too hard to be different.
Regrettably, I don’t have access to the lyrics, so I cannot possibly keep track of a multi-language concept, but even if they taled the most heart-wrenching story I’d ever heard on a prog album, they couldn’t save Telluric Inharmonies from its glut. Hteththemeth flew too close to the sun here and crashed and burned like Therion on every release post-2012—that’s the tale of a band whose overly long, bombastic concept albums have been laughably bad for ages, for those who don’t keep up with the symphonic metal pioneers. Telluric Harmonies is the sad story of a band full of ambition and quirk but not quite able to avoid tumbling into cliché on their Icarian descent.
Hteththemeth are right to call themselves enigmatic, but there’s simply nothing to gain from deciphering this incoherent sonic puzzle. Try as I might to find redeeming aspects on my listens, there are no catchy melodies nor standout choruses, no dazzling solos nor grand climaxes, so everything washes over you, leaving only the bad taste of interludes. Hteththemeth ambitiously try to soar into ‘unhuman’ territory, but instead end up floating aimlessly in a string of interludes and bland progressive rock.
Recommended tracks: Honest Lies, The Fools and Failed Queens, The Odyssey of Nothing, I Wanted You All, The Poetry of Failure
You may also like: Pagan’s Mind, The Chronomaster Project, Destiny Potato, Seventh Station, Rise of the Architect, Vitam Aeternam, Max Enix, Dreamwalkers Inc
Final verdict: 3/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram | Facebook | Metallum
Label: Layered Reality Productions – Bandcamp | Facebook | Website
Hteththemeth is:
LÄO KREEGAN – vocals and lyrics
VLAD-ANDREI ONESCU – piano, keyboards & FX, backing vocals
LUCIAN POPA – guitars, backing vocals
RADU CÎNDEA “CJ” – guitars, backing vocals
MIHAI RĂDULESCU “KOLDR”– bass guitar, backing vocals
CODRUȚ COSTEA “CODREZ” – drums and percussion
Featuring the guest musicians:
Alexandra Enache – Cello
Eric-Andrei Costea – Piano
Crina Marinescu – Vocals
Flavia Dobre – Vocals
0 Comments