So the two albums out of the pile I want to talk about today are the prog albums! Hence, the name of this article! Vu sent me The Atomized Dream by Statesboro, Georgia's Canvas Solaris (the way less metal one) and Dark Deceiver by Pleasanton, California's Zero Hour (the way more metal one) to cover. Both have really different sounds, but both kind of fall into a “prog” sort of thing, although in totally different ways. So hey! Even though they'll definitely appeal to different kinds of music fans, I figure that's enough excuse to just talk about both bands in one post!
The first band I want to talk about is Canvas Solaris. These guys remind me of The Fucking Champs, but more technical and less jokey. Apparently at some point in time, these guys were a death metal band. Now they're just strange and awesome prog rock without vocals. The first track, “The Binaural Beat,” focuses on sort of Mega Man-esque electronics with guitars providing a nice flourish to them. The musicianship is awesome, but with an excellent sense of restraint. The second track, “Reflections Carried to the Mirror” has more of a metal vibe to it, but in that really “prog” sort of way, where it sounds like the background music to an awesome 80's video game played through the best sound card money can buy. I love this sort of thing. The breakdown has a really cool vibe to it that I can't quite describe. “Chromatic Dusk” has cool, syncopated percussion and an almost-dance guitar riff going on. The keyboard tone reminds me a little bit of early Boards of Canada. “Patterns Spiral Into Swarm” starts out just sounding like a Fucking Champs song, but then breaks down repeatedly with weird synth parts played over a combination of what sounds like both live and programmed drums. “Heat Distortion Manifest,” on the other hand, just throws ambient synth parts right out there from nearly the beginning with the guitar breaking them up. Eventually it builds up into an awesome divebombing guitar thing. Then halfway through, it breaks down again into ambient territory before not even bothering to really build up, so much as just instantly switch gears in that cool way that only a really tight band can pull off. “Photovoltaic” is one of the longer songs on the album. It starts off with a kinda chilled out acoustic guitar/piano/drums thing and then almost dead on, halfway through the song, the distortion kicks in and it gets louder. The flanger effect is pretty cool, as is that cool fast bass riff in there. The last couple minutes are more straightforward, with plenty of weird rhythms, but also a lot of that “I'm playing Mega Man!” vibe. The next track, “Solar Droid,” is all about the glitchy rhythms and crazy guitar work, sort of in the vein of early Dillinger Escape Plan, in that there's not a lot of obvious repetition. The last track is the longest. “The Unknowable and Defeating Glow” starts off with what sounds like hand drums and an electric guitar playing a repetitive lead bit while the synth builds up under it. This track is pretty much what the rest of the album seems to have been building up to. It's epic as hell, with lots of cool synth effects, glitchy rhythms, and progressively louder and longer chaotic bits breaking them up. This track is awesome.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like these guys are on tour. But I would definitely recommend checking them out if you're into things like Dillinger Escape Plan, The Fucking Champs, Mr. Bungle, or things along those lines. You can also go check out the samples on their MySpace page.
Secondly, Dark Deceiver. Based on the cover art, I didn't really think I'd be into this at all, and even though it's really not the kind of thing I'm really into, I have to give these guys props for the sheer technicality of this thing. This is a good thing. This is on the heavier end of prog-metal, with lots of distortion, thrashy but complex riffing, and a vocalist that reminds me a lot of Dio when he lets it fly. This guy's range is actually pretty awesome. The drumming is really heavy on double bass. Really, half or more of this album probably has fast double-bass going under it. The first track, “Power to Believe,” alone has more time changes and guitar solos than some entire albums. But, of course, it's prog-metal, so that just kind of comes with the territory. The title track, “Dark Deceiver” has some really “prog” vocals going on. Most listeners will either find them hilarious, or be able to at least appreciate the technicality of them. I don't know how much in-between there is for something like this. The guitar on this song is just insane shred. These guys definitely have their technical skills down, and this album seems to be all about them. The next track, “Inner Spirit” takes a good two minutes for the vocals to come in, but it's a twelve minute song, so that's kind of excusable. It kind of has a De-Loused in the Comatorium vibe in a few places. After that are a couple shorter tracks. A welcome breather. This album is pretty well sequenced. “Resurrection” is a kind of slowed down track. It's still pretty damn fast, but for this album, it's a “slow” track. The guitar riffs are cool, and kind of snake around each other in an oddly enthralling way. “Tendonitis” is also pretty short, and I'd assume named after the consequences of recording this thing. It's also got a silly-ass little sample at the beginning and end that makes me thankful these guys aren't taking themselves too seriously. “The Temple Within,” at this point, is the longest track left on the album. It's full of strange tempos that would probably make most bands' heads spin. Kind of like the whole album, really, but they're particularly strange here. “Lies is a shorter track. It's more straightforward than most of the other stuff here. Definitely not one of the album's stronger tracks. “The Passion of Words” makes up for it, though, with more of that rhythmic complexity that makes this band so cool. The last track, “Severed Angel,” opens with a quiet ambient noise bit that builds up with blast beats getting progressively louder before everything else comes in and just kinda starts playing along with it. It's the second shortest track on the album, and to be honest, it doesn't really go anywhere. It just keeps doing that for two and a half minutes, before going into something that sounds like an intro, and then back into blastbeats. An odd ending for the album, for sure.
Anyway, the album is out now, and these guys have a couple live shows coming up. On July 12th, they're playing the South Texas Metal Fest. Then in October, they're heading to Baarlo, Netherlands for Prog Power Europe on the 4th, and they're playing shows on October 31st and November 1st in Copenhagen at the Rock for Prog Power Scandinavia. If you like your music fast, heavy, and technical, these guys might be up your alley. And, of course, they have a MySpace page you can check out.
-Soup
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