Style: Progressive Metal, Hard Rock (Mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Pain of Salvation, Votum, Evergrey, Tremonti
Review by: Christopher
Country: France
Release date: 29 July, 2023
Sleep Token has “Vessel”, Sermon has “Him” and now The Barrel has, er, “The Barrel”. The Barrel is the nome de plume of this anonymous veteran of the French underground, who sings, composes, and performs vocals, guitar and bass—and is joined by drummer Remi Serafino and keyboardist Fred Colombo—for this debut album.
Despite claiming to be an “unconventional cry for curiosity, diversity and musical exploration” and “hoisting up high the flag of originality”, Worldconnector is a pretty standard entry into the canon of melodic Scandi-inspired metal with a grungy sensibility. That isn’t to sell it short. The Barrel has a distinctive voice, with a pleasingly gruff timbre, and he’s a very talented guitarist whose riffs and soloing remind me of Mark Tremonti at times. Nonetheless it’s a rather safe album, sticking to a tried and tested style of anthemic hard rock/melodic metal with progressive aspirations that I wish were more fully realised.
“Ascending Soul”, which opens with a pleasing Spanish guitar motif, sees The Barrel lean far more heavily into harsh vocals and really get stuck into soloing, both of which he showcases a strong talent for. On “Spousing the Devil” he performs an interesting descent from his gruff cleans into the harshes, and “Dysfunctional Soul” is driven by a compelling tension. Worldconnector closes with “Aeria Materia”, an instrumental track with epic vibes but which ultimately feels a little lacking without The Barrel’s gruff vocals. And the trouble is, this isn’t a big instrumental number that shows off the playing chops, it feels more like a song that was meant to have vocals originally but they were never recorded.
The lyrics are… variable. “Follow” talks about wanting to live in Hyrule, which is a Steven Wilson level of trying to be down with the kids, but most of the time the songs walk that cliched hard rock line between angsty and defiant. The anthemic sensibility and solid production do much of the heavy lifting here. There’s a throwback quality to Worldconnector, reminiscent of the type of hard rock you used to hear on YouTube AMV’s circa 2007, back when the only music app was a video website and you listened to random playlists while getting mullered in Runescape PVP. It’s almost as though The Barrel has specifically made this album in the hopes of appealing to me when I was fourteen; fourteen year old me would’ve loved this, thirty year old me has reservations.
The problem is that The Barrel knows how to write a catchy prog-adjacent hard rock track, but there’s only so many ways one can do that, and so, despite flourishes of harsh vocals or more frenetic soloing, Worldconnector begins to feel formulaic rather quickly. And running to a solid hour means that sense of by-the-numbers writing becomes more apparent as time wears on. Upon every listen I found myself digging a run of two or three songs, but subsequent tracks began to blur into one; when every song is designed to be a hard rock banger it’s hard for any of them to stand out.
Worldconnector is a very solid debut but making catchy, hard rocking metal with hooks aplenty is like shooting fish in a… The Barrel is an interesting project held together by passion, capacious production and a consummate knowledge of composition, but one that stays in tried and tested territory; The Barrel clearly has the requisite talent to push himself further and I’d love to hear him do so. Lock, stock and barrel, Worldconnector is by no means scraping the bottom of the barrel, but neither is it a full-blown barrel of laughs.
Recommended tracks: Ascending Soul, Dysfunctional Creature, Spousing the Devil
You may also like: Pressure Points, Diagonal Path, Sunbeam Overdrive
Final verdict: 6.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Facebook | Metal-Archives page
Label: Independent
The Barrel is:
– The Barrel (vocals, guitars, bass)
– Remi Serafino (drums)
– Fred Colombo (keyboard)
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