Album Review: Pridian - "Venetian Dark"

Debut albums can be hard to read.  If they’re any good at all, they fall into two camps - the first is the more common, which is the camp of “they’ve been writing these songs for ten years, constantly refining them and finding their voice, and this is the pinnacle of what this band will ever be.” Think Life of Agony and “River Runs Red.”  The less common camp is the one populated by records that are good…but are instilled with the promise of so much more.  Think Iron Maiden’s debut album.  The second camp forces upon us that thing we hate most in our modern lives - delayed gratification - but the patience is worth the agonizing wait, as bands in the second camp are capable of stratospheric careers.

Enter Pridian, a shiny new metal band out of Estonia (you read that right, Estonia, which has the coolest flag of all the Baltic countries, hands down,) who is casting their lot into the metal circle with their debut album “Venetian Dark.”

(Sidebar: the band apparently used to be known by another name in Estonia, ÆØNS, and released an album under that name, so whether this is truly a debut record or not is distinctly in the eye of the beholder, but it really has little bearing on the substance of this review.)

Pridian aims to be a lot of things to a lot of people.  A metalcore band at heart, there’s a lot of electronic undertones and industrial atmospheres, and in the end, the stew ends up something like a Gen Z version of Fear Factory, complete with the occasional soft(er) contemplative piece.  

Skip on down to the fifth track, “DINY,” because that’s where the album really comes to life.  There’s a “Mr. Roboto” synth line vocal to start, accompanied by a hammering but very accessible metal riff.  The juxtaposition of those elements in and of themselves is novel enough, but then the main beat breaks and the song adds more layers, becoming a catchy, fun metal smasher.  The clean vocals of the chorus tie the whole thing together, and keep the piece grounded amidst the chaos surrounding it.  Within The Ruins could pick up a tip of two if they gave it a listen.

“Void Resonance” is the next real highlight, and man, it serves to remind how long it’s been since we’ve heard a metal band that can be versatile within a single song.  Okay, fine, “Void Resonance” is not even three minutes long, and every part of it is metal through and through, but the first half and the second half tell two different stories, and there’s just not enough of that in the genre in the last couple of years.  We’re not talking about something as dramatically, gleefully chaotic as Destrage, but we are talking about an artist in Pridian who is capable of thinking in parallel lines.

Pridian spends most of “Venetian Dark” circling the concept of mixing metalcore and electronic into a single package.  Most of the cuts are permutations of that idea, where the band feeds different percentages of each into their creative machine and sees what the process spits out.  “Out for Blood” is a Browning-style electronic mash, but with softer vocals thrown in that serve as a protective layer.  “Darker Tides” is almost the same thing, but switches out the consistent soft vocals for a mix of harsher ones, and tips the scales more toward guitar distortion.  

What you’re probably realizing as you read this, is that “Venetian Dark” is an album built on experimentation in the moment, a mixture of ideas and concepts atom-smashed into cohesive songs, or at least something resembling them.  Part and parcel with that is the necessary double-edged blade of trying out a bunch of different stuff - it doesn’t all work.  “Cyanide Dreams” is a straight-ahead metal banger…but that’s all it is.  One of a thousand similar straight-ahead metal bangers. The album’s lead track “The Downfall of Apathy,” ambles about and never quite finds a home, and later on, “Ruin” is going for the soft-Fear-Factory aesthetic we talked about, but it’s messy -  it doesn’t have the (relatively) clean definition of FF’s “Resurrection.” (Man, remember when Fear Factory was a good band?)

I like “Venetian Dark,” but I wish I liked it just a little more, because there’s something here, something that could be explosive and novel and groundbreaking and great.  Pieces of it are there, easy to see, sticking out from the scattered detritus of the genre like prehistoric bones jutting out from the ground after a monsoon.  “Venetian Dark” is a quality album, but it’s Just. Not. Quite. There.  Wherever there is, and whatever that means.  I am already anxiously awaiting the band’s sophomore album, eagerly hoping Pridian falls into the second camp.