Style: progressive metal, technical death metal, groove metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Gojira, Car Bomb, Slugdge, Anciients
Country: Costa Rica
Release date: 7 January 2025
Progressive metal just had a monster of a year, and Gojira reigned king. Very few acts in our genre have claimed a Grammy Award, and exactly one has played at the Olympics. If you were transfixed by “Mea Culpa (Ah! Ça ira!)” and now find yourself among the newest legion of prog fans: welcome! Next, consider checking out Nostoc’s latest release, Rites of Passage. While their name might not loom quite so large as history’s most notable kaiju (in fact, nostoc is a type of single-celled algae), this Central American act’s house style of groovy death metal invokes the same infectious riffage and relentless energy that drew me to Gojira in the first place.
Rites of Passage follows Nostoc‘s 2017 effort, Ævum, which featured such titles as “The Anamnesic Voyage” and (Lord have mercy) “Saturnian Mindscope Introspection.” The band’s latest release dials back the song titling—at times to a Seinfeldian extent—but continues to embrace an atmosphere of esoteric horror fantasy. Gustavo Quirós’s exquisite album art features a brain creature surrounded by mysterious emblems. My wordless understanding of Rites of Passage is that each of the creature’s eight pictographs represents one of the eight “rites.” For example, the feather might refer to the ave de luz y oscuridad (or, “bird of light and darkness”) referenced in the Spanish-language passage of “Opus.” Drawing these connections was an engaging exercise that helped me dig into the album’s narrative.
Rites of Passage is about a primordial force of nature reclaiming an Earth that humanity has stolen from it, identifying this creature through track titles (“War Mother,” “Legion,” “Healer”) or explaining its motives (“The Whole,” “The Cleanse”). There are multiple valid interpretations of the “Healer”—a forest spirit, a biomechanical hivemind, a visitor from beyond—but one truth is undeniable: it’s pretty pissed off. The messaging is aggressively environmentalist without taking the listener out of the album’s world
The metal itself is equally aggressive. Speaking of a force of nature: drummer Emanuel Calderon is the unsung hero of this record. The drumbeats are full and thunderous throughout, but also erratic, rarely settling into one pattern, a bold choice that pays off handsomely on repeated listens. The vocals largely employ a crispy snarl which is positively demonic without sounding tortured. Nostoc‘s “Opus” (not to be confused with Nospūn‘s Opus) features the most vocal styles, mixing guttural death growls with more blackened banshee-yelling, clean vocals layered atop them, a downright melodic Spanish-language section, and some bizarre cackling thrown in for good measure. The band’s willingness to be theatrical on this front elevates just about every song on the tracklist to being “at least interesting” if not outright “good.”
Rites of Passage is varied and eccentric enough to be undeniable prog, but never strays so far from its headbanging roots to alienate the baseline metalhead. This is a veritable niche, but I would have liked to see some more work like “The Path.” This song is a full-on detour into reverberated, flowery instrumental, à la the interstitial tracks on earlier Baroness albums. The tranquil strumming of “The Path” offers a reprieve from the music’s violence and serves as an atmospheric trailhead into “The Cleanse.” This is because Nostoc, unlike their namesake cyanobacteria, barely stop to breathe at all throughout Rites of Passage‘s 47-minute runtime.
The music oscillates wall-to-wall between ferocious and menacing. Some listeners will appreciate this—and it undeniably serves the album’s story and aesthetic—but the lack of audible “footholds” becomes noticeable in the back half of Rites of Passage, when the songs really start to run together. “Moons of Daath” is the worst offender here: an eight-minute wall of sound broken up by the occasional groovy riff or unusual scream. Even the excellent “Opus” feels a little too long to bear the weight of Nostoc‘s sound, an issue that emerges more broadly across Rites of Passage’s runtime. If you listen through Rites of Passage and follow only the drums, it is a loud, eclectic, and ultimately great listen; if you do the same with the strings, or the vocals, it is similarly pleasant; but in unison, the band does not amount to more than the sum of its parts. If “the strings” and “the drums” are dance partners, they are perfectly in step, but one never twirls the other. Additionally, the vocalists, though talented, never come soaring in on the wings of a tasty riff: sometimes they seem content to simply tell a tale on top of the instruments, all the while screaming because, “Hey, we’re playing death metal!”
Groove metal at the level of technicality that Nostoc demonstrate is a fascinating genre experiment. Creating music that is both virtuosic and melodic is a tall order for any musician. If you are an appreciator of, for example, Gorguts-flavored death metal, you might even find these two endeavours to be at odds with each other. Technical metal demands attention; catchy metal necessitates a pit. The task of the progressive musician is to carefully string these disparate elements together into a satisfying composition. It is an unenviable task. I don’t think that Nostoc have entirely stuck the landing here: they have undoubtedly, however, created something both interesting and enjoyable to listen to, and that is an achievement in itself. Sonically, Rites of Passage is a whale of an album. That whale just hasn’t found its wings quite yet.
Recommended tracks: Legion, The Path, Opus
You may also like: Ahasver, The Gorge, Pull Down the Sun, Sanzu, Liverum
Final verdict: 6/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page
Label: Independent
Nostoc is:
– David Miranda (guitars)
– Emanuel Calderon (drums)
– Seth Gonzalez (bass)
– Alberto Hernandez (guitars, new)
– Adriana Muñoz (vocals, new)
– Freddy Lopez (guitars/vocals, former)
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