Style: Progressive death metal, folk, chamber music (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Ne Obliviscaris, Opeth, Gorguts
Country: Pennsylvania, United States
Release date: 24 June, 2024
When I show my music taste to my friends, they describe it as the most powerful attack with piss poor accuracy. A solid 85% of the time, I show them a complete miss that leaves them second guessing their friendship with me, but that remaining 15% is where the real heavy hitters come in. I still remember my friend proclaiming Wilderun the greatest thing to ever happen to music after showing him “The Unimaginable Zero Summer,” mere days after he said he wasn’t into prog.
But the secret is, this attack is also effective on me, too. When I comb through the new releases, there’s a low, low chance that anything sticks. Half the time, it’s usually from a band I already know. Then, there’s the even lower chance for that critical hit. That natural 20, just when I need it the most. In a late-night haze, I discovered Orgone’s Pleroma from a random Youtube recommendation, and it only took me the first few seconds to realize this was going to be something incredibly special.
When a death metal album starts with beautiful, dueling clean vocals, violin, and piano, you know it’s going to be great, but it’s what comes after that sold me on Pleroma: Instead of the typical, Opethian riffing you’d hear in many prog-death bands, Orgone opts for something you’d hear from the Gorguts playbook. This is, to my knowledge, the first album that fuses dissodeath-style riffing and songwriting with those beautiful, melodic breaks that prog-death is generally known for.
“Valley of the Locust” gave me whiplash when I first heard it, especially after getting lost within the trance-inducing intro. Stephen Jarrett treats his guitar more like a screaming violin, retaining much of the screechy-skronky riffage that makes this album special. I could hear the actual violin in the background, but it all seemed to get lost within the chaos at first. The five-ish minute mark gave me a break to try and decipher what I’d just listened to, with the death metal fading away to the album’s first chamber section.
As great as the first “real” track was, it was the stretch of “Hymne a la Beaute” to “Ubiquitous Divinity” where Pleroma really drew me in. Going full Aquilus and almost entirely eschewing death metal for the next eleven minutes, Orgone paint the most amazing sonic portrait with the use of their female vocalist (whose name I unfortunately can’t find anywhere) and their string instruments.
Like the aforementioned master of fusing black metal and classical, Orgone prove their serious chops in not just fusing genres together within this stretch of songs, but writing those genres seamlessly into their sound. Any of these songs could stand on their own, and the fact that they provide a nice break and segue into the nearly eighteen minute ‘Trawling the Depths’.
While Pleroma is pretty massive at sixty-five minutes, I wouldn’t call it bloated in the slightest. That being said, it’s one dense album. It took me a few listens for things to truly sink in, and I have still barely parsed most of the album’s epics.
What’s even more incredible is the album managed to hold my attention after “Trawling the Depths.” Here I was thinking I was ready to throw in the towel until I realized the album’s finale and title track was almost over. And what an ending it has. It almost seems that the entire affair is building and building to that final, triumphant shout of “COLOR THE LIIIIIIIIGHT”, making it one of my favorite musical moments of the year and a serious contender for the coveted SOTY.
I had no clue that Orgone existed before this year, but this album is, without a doubt, one of the best thing’s I’ve heard all year. Scoring it is gonna be a bit tricky since while I know it’s incredible, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Pleroma has to offer. So, I score this conservatively with a caveat for the time being. This is likely to end up on my end of year list, and when it does, I think I’ll have a more concrete score then. Until then, I’ll just have to keep spinning this.
Recommended tracks: Please just listen to the whole thing
You may also like: Aquilus, Dessiderium, Lorem Ipsum
Final verdict: 9/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal-Archives page
Label: Independent
Orogne is:
– Andrew Ransom (Bass)
– Kent Wilson (Cello)
– Justin Wharton (Drums, precussion)
– Steven Jarrett (Guitars, vocals, keyboards)
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