Style: Progressive metal (mostly clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Pain of Salvation, Haken, Dream Theater, Enslaved
Review by: Sam
Country: Canada
Release date: 17 August 2018
[EDITOR’S NOTE: This review was originally published in the August 2018 issue of The Progressive Subway, before we even had a website!]
Hold on is that Daniel Gildenlow? No, no, never mind. It’s someone called Evan Haydon-Selkirk. Wait am I listening to Enslaved? No, no this is a traditional prog metal band called The Aphelion, there shouldn’t be any black metal on this. Wait when did Haken come on stage? Huh ok now it’s Dream Theater. WHAT THE HELL this sounds like Sigh. This. Is… AWESOME! Almost. Ok, not really. It has potential though!
I was quite excited to listen to this band. I had them bookmarked for a month or so already and reviews on it were raving. Good traditional prog metal is rare, very rare. Most of the time traditional prog metal bands tend to sound like Dream Theater clones, but then instead of wanking at 4 million beats per second in 69/42 like our Lord and Savior John Petruccesus they only come to a meager 500 bpm in ¾ time, the plebs. In other words: both originality and proper execution are hard to find in this genre. The resulting question of course is, where does The Aphelion fall on this spectrum?.
Initially I was very impressed with this record. The Aphelion is not a band that can easily be described. It’s not like you can just list two or three bands and be done with it as they take influences from basically every major band in the genre ever: Fates Warning-esque riffs, Dream Theater-esque solo passages, Pain of Salvation-esque singing and buildup, Haken-esque diddly breaks (there’s an accordion), etc. And to top it off they also include some black metal passages which bring to mind other greats like Enslaved, Borknagar or Sigh even. This blend of bands gives some truly fantastic moments in the record.
However, this mesmerizing combo of bands in the end turned out to be also the band’s biggest weakness. This record is like a salad bowl, but then without any sauce on top of it. The Aphelion continuously borrows from other bands (and do so quite effectively), but what they sound like themselves remains a mystery to me. And like with any remake of a classic, it’s worse than the original. It should come as no surprise that Pain of Salvation is better at being Pain of Salvation than The Aphelion is. And the same goes for all the other bands. Tied with questionable mixing the record ends up being a fun, but ultimately forgettable experience.
Recommended tracks: The Twilight Basin, Conflict Theory (A Cry for War), Ecliptic
You may also like: Pain of Salvation, Haken, Dream Theater, Enslaved
Final verdict: 6.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page
Label: Independent
The Aphelion is:
– Evan Haydon-Selkirk (vocals, bass)
– Tyler Davis (guitars, backing vocals)
– James Cabral (guitars, keyboards, backing vocals)
– Nate Livingstone (drums, percussion)
0 Comments