Style: progressive metal, progressive rock (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Porcupine Tree, Anathema, Ions, more recent Circus Maximus
Country: Sweden
Release date: 16 May, 2024
When it comes to concept albums, science fiction seems like a natural pairing with progressive metal. Although they originate from different artistic media, both genres focus on exploring new spaces and uncovering new sensations which allow the audience to recontextualize our mundane experience of the here and now. Finding Love In Strange Places structures itself similarly to a collection of individual short stories, depicting a series of unexpected romantic connections in harsh futuristic settings, or as PreHistoric Animals describe it in the blurb on their website, “a dystopic version of the movie Love Actually.” As a result, there’s no apparent narrative through-line that covers the whole album, but rather each track paints its own vignette with no relation to its neighbors aside from broad aesthetics and perhaps a shared fictional setting, although it’s hard to divine that level of specific detail.
Such constrained storytelling offers a refreshing change from the monolithic stories characteristic of concept albums like Metropolis, Pt. 2 or Tiara or even this year’s Binary Dream which inevitably lose their way somewhere in the middle of the narrative, making unexplained leaps of story logic that leave the listener straggling behind. Instead, the individual song format serves much better for laying out a quick presentation and allows the lyrics to focus on creating self-contained, often more abstract individual scenes without getting mired in forcing an overarching narrative to make sense. That said, for all the conceptual groundwork behind Finding Love, none of the tracks truly nail their own worldbuilding. Take “He Is Number 4,” for example, whose story is briefly described by the band as “Employee number 10 is about to blow up the whole factory when she falls in love with number 4.” Disappointingly, the limited scope of lyrics spanning just two verses and a chorus hardly build anything deeper or more detailed than that single sentence summary. Of course, a four-minute song can never be expected to provide the greatest of poetic masterpieces, but it still offers plenty of runtime that could be used to develop more distinctive and memorable imagery in its storytelling, perhaps with the aid of greater structural complexity.
Musically, it feels like PreHistoric Animals start off without the clearest picture of how they want Finding Love to sound. The opener “The City of My Dreams” comes across as unfocused, split between a couple of different moods which don’t fit together all that well despite being individually performed very capably. While the verses build a futuristic backing mood of light keyboards and guitars to support and highlight the lead vocal line, the heavier choruses don’t display the same balance and grace, feeling more mashed together and tacked on by comparison. This feeling largely fades as the album progresses, though, allowing more and more of their quality musicianship to shine through instead. Although the followup “Living in a World of Bliss” still lacks the elegance of the opener’s verse sections, it achieves much deeper aesthetic focus, drawing greater internal cohesion from its noticeable electronica influences and building a strong groove throughout each verse with tight lyricism and vocal rhythms.
This progression continues through the middle tracks as the band members find their compositional footing, culminating in “The Secret Society of Goodness.” In these songs, we see the band’s true skill for both composition and performance, with more complex structural development and more gradual, carefully considered transitions between moods rather than slamming one into the next. In the spirit of other heavy prog rock bands like Riverside, PreHistoric Animals add a quiet heaviness to the places that need it most by increasing the intensity of the instrumental parts (particularly the bass) rather than by piling on heavily distorted guitar effects. Their signature also includes a wide array of keyboard features (which you would hope for when every band member is credited as playing some form of keyboard), deepening the futuristic mood with sounds ranging from piano to cyberpunk synth arpeggios.
Alas, such honed quality can’t last forever. Although I highly doubt that this was their intended meaning, the title of closing track “Nothing Has Changed But Everything Is Different” offers an oddly apropos summary of Finding Love In Strange Places. Although the closer feels more focused than the overly varied opening tracks, it’s also less poised and impactful than the middle half, with trite spoken-word sections and a bit more cheesy Christmas energy than it has compelling substance. We close the album almost—but not quite—where it all began, just with a different vibe and a greater appreciation for what the band was able to accomplish musically along the way.
Finding Love In Strange Places gets off to a rough, slow start, but—minus a few interlude tracks that, as ever, add disappointingly little to the total experience of the album—solidly hits its stride on the back two-thirds and cobbles together a memorable, high-quality experience in the end. When the band know what they want to do with their music, they have no problems executing that vision, but for the first two full tracks they just don’t know how to get started and struggle to find their footing; in contrast, the later tracks (culminating in “The Secret Society of Goodness”) come across as exciting and dynamic and show heightened skill in both composition and performance. By mimicking a short story anthology, PreHistoric Animals offer a more compact and personal experience than that of a typical grand concept album, and such individual hit songs stand out that much more when not entangled in an overwrought narrative.
Recommended tracks: Unbreakable, He Is Number 4, The Secret Society of Goodness
You may also like: Turbulence, Echoes and Signals, Hillward, Sisare
Final verdict: 7/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram
Label: Dutch Music Works – Bandcamp | Instagram
PreHistoric Animals is:
– Stefan Altzar (vocals, guitars, keyboards)
– Samuel Granath (drums, keyboards)
– Noah Magnusson (bass, keyboards)
– Daniel Magdic (guitars, vocals, keyboards)
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