Style: traditional/djent (clean vocals)
Review by: Eric
Country: Greece
Release date: 04-04-2018
NOTE: This album was originally included in the 2018 missed albums issue of The Progressive Subway
Within Progress is a relative newcomer to the Progressive Metal world, having so far only released this one EP. While it’s certainly not perfect, the EP definitely shows a lot of potential if this Greek quintet ever continues on to release a full-length.
The somewhat deceptive intro track Celestial Notion gives the impression that this is going to be a laid back album with a post-rock atmosphere, but this is definitely not the case for the remainder of the EP’s five tracks. This intro is followed almost immediately by one of those technical odd-time riffs that basically scream “is THIS progressive enough for you?” and things pretty much continue along those same lines for the remainder of the runtime. Most of this EP is driven by chunky guitars, which are almost djent-adjacent at times in their tone. They’re supported nicely by an equally impressive rhythm section. One almost gets the feeling that these guys had a checklist of time signatures on hand in order to make sure they hit every single one at some point. Listeners who like their prog to be unapologetically, well, prog-y (and I include myself among that group) should find a lot to enjoy here.
With that being said, the vocals do feel like a slight negative. While not necessarily bad, the singer does have a rather noticeable Eastern European accent which can be a bit distracting at times, though on repeated listens I mostly got used to it. The bigger issue is that it sounds a bit like all of these songs were written as instrumentals first, with the vocal melodies awkwardly inserted afterward. Whether or not this is actually the case, a lot of the vocal lines end up being rather forgettable. There’s definitely some attempts at creating some more emotional, dramatic moments from time to time, and it actually ends up working pretty well on the closing track “Bliss In Ignorance,” but most of the rest of the time I found it falling a bit flat.
The band also occasionally likes to insert some Middle Eastern sounding melodies and scales into their guitar lines. While this doesn’t really end up doing a whole lot to make this EP terribly unique among technical/progressive metal acts, a lot of the instrumental work really does end up being catchy on its own rather than just being boringly technical. In particular I can definitely see “Divine Intervention” being a future favorite at live performances just because of how powerfully those opening guitar riffs manage to hit, and that same track really becomes an absolute banger when the tempo picks up about ⅔ of the way through (not that it was exactly a slow song to begin with, either). Same goes for that awesome (and audible!) slapping bass on the title track.
So all in all, I enjoyed Oceans of Time, and hopefully Within Progress will have a full-length coming out at some point soon.
Recommended tracks: Bliss in Ignorance, Divine Intervention
Recommended for fans of: Distorted Harmony, TesseracT, Textures, SikTh
Final verdict: 7/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | RYM page
Label: Independent
Within Progress is:
– Efthimis Papadopoulos (vocals)
-Tasos Plataniotis (guitars)
– Polydoros Dardogiannos (drums)
-Giorgos Charalampidis (bass)
– Vagelis Iliopoulos (guitars)
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