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.

Album Review: Within The Ruins - "Phenomena II"

Good news and bad news.  

Good news first.  Within The Ruins’ new album, “Phenomena II” is tremendously skillful, as deft an execution of brutal but still accessible metalcore as there exists in the genre.  The band remains totally unique amidst their brethren, still willing to eschew the sheer viciousness of their genre in favor of an ultra-clean guitar sound and high-flying melodies, studded with blistering solos.  Everything that makes this band great and novel remains gloriously intact.

Bad news. “Phenomena II” sounds absolutely identical to the previous album, “Black Heart.”  Wiping away the familiarity over the past four years with “Black Heart,” to put the combined twenty-one songs of the two albums into a big pool and draw them out, it would be nearly impossible to discern which was from which album.

This is the perpetual pitfall of a genre like metalcore and those akin to it – the boundaries are so specific, the tenets of the genre so rigidly unbending (and the auditory distortion and vocal growling so unceasing,) that bands can, and often do, struggle to differentiate their pieces.  (The Browning, cousins to metalcore, suffered from a similar issue.  They made a noble attempt to break some conventions for “Geist,” but were ultimately unsuccessful.)

Listen, let’s not get too far down the rabbit hole here.  None of this is to say that “Phenomena II” isn’t good, or isn’t worth listening to.  It’s easy to focus on the negative, but focus instead on everything that was said in the first paragraph.  Still plenty of good news here.  Within The Ruins is still the gold standard for technical metalcore; nothing there has been altered.

As it has been in the past, the band is at their best when experimenting with instrumentals.  “Level 12” is a glorious ride – it changes pace, alters cadence, offers glimpses of the prowess of the players, both in the playing and in the mastering.  Every instrument, every musicians, has a voice in this song, it’s just that there’s no vocals.

Same goes for “Death Mask,” which, if you can hear the thread under the top layer, is the best thrash instrumental in ages.  There’s a breakdown around the 2:15 mark that is delicious in its simplicity of riff, contrast to the rest of the tune (and the album,) and then it transitions into a brief but tuneful solo.

One might be so bold as to suggest that this kind of songwriting, but coupled with vocals, would make for a truly extraordinary Within The Ruins experience.

So look, this is what it comes down to.  If you’re already familiar with Within The Ruins, grab this if for no other reason than “Death Mask,” and don’t be shocked when it feels like you’ve heard it all before.  If you’re never heard Within The Ruins before, this is a great record that will serve as a perfect entry point.

Album Review: CLEARxCUT - "Age of Grief"

Boy, metalcore can be an unforgiving genre, can’t it?  Many have tried, and few have succeeded, to truly find the proper balance that can cater to the stringent, fan-imposed boundaries of metal and hardcore and furthermore produce some art that appeals on more than an academic level.

The Germans CLEARxCUT, here embarking on their third album, make one of nobler attempts in recent years to bridge all gaps and still sound idiomatically their own.  This new effort, “Age of Grief,” makes a lot of mileage by slowing down the pace, which seems counterintuitive to the fashionable blast beats of modern metal and the time-honored tradition of hardcore songs not overstaying their welcome.  

“Burial Shroud,” despite being the second song we’re presented with, is truly the launching point of the offering, as it extols the virtues of the careful pacing referenced above.  CLEARxCUT doesn’t make the song into something it shouldn’t be – it moves not carefully but comfortably, easy in its movements and accented by a clean guitar tone that separates from the buzz of the rhythm and slurred beat of the percussion.

The record’s third cut, “Against Leviathan,” is the album’s best and where CLEARxCUT shines brightest both in the study of their own craft, and in the fusion of seemingly alien elements into a whole that forms strong chemical bonds.  Where CLEARxCUT excels is in simplicity; it would have been easy, and dare we say creatively lazy, for the band to simply crush a bunch of overdriven notes into a small suitcase, press it to a digital track and walk away feeling accomplished.  Instead, the band does more by doing less – the guitar riffs, such as they are, are single-note affairs, played at a walking pace, and never is this more apparent than in “Against Leviathan;” as the song shifts into a second gear, the riff is already familiar and embedded to the listener.  When it ultimately recedes into the background, its echoes still influence and color everything that happens after.

This theme of careful note selection and sparse, open-space riffing continues through the duration of the record, from “Unwritten” to “Privilege” and all the way at the end with “The Eternal Demise.”  It makes for a record for which the simple sobriquet of “metalcore” feels inaccurate, if not deceptive.  Not to say that “Age of Grief” isn’t a metalcore record, but only that there’s more to it than that, a greater sense of craft and artistic expression.

CLEARxCUT’s new album doesn’t steer entirely clear of rocky trails, however.  In a way, the album is a victim of its own best features, as the pace and simplicity which so capably set it apart from its contemporaries also results in a feeling of sameness as the record runs its course.  It took multiple listens to get to the point where anything besides “Against Leviathan” stuck in the memory in a significant way.  The other eight cuts are all permutations of a theme; a successful theme, to be sure, but a repetitive one.  When listening, the nuance of “Age of Grief” is likely best experienced without the intrusion of cumbersome outside distractions, but moments like that feel hard to come by in our modern, hectic lives.

“Age of Grief” should be lauded for its profound, anti-Newtonian discovery of the idea that the best way to blend two fast-moving objects may be to slow down and allow the pieces to breathe and find synergy.  The best moments of the album are highly enjoyable, but in many ways, we are still at best left with the taste of an album that is interesting mostly from an academic perspective.