Adolyne‘s Of Ash / of Shit / of Shame is what I’d call a post-mathcore (post-hardcore with mathcore elements to it) album from 2015. It’s a really gnarly bunch of tracks with heavy riffs taking a tangent on the math side of things, which reminds me a bit of Amia Venera Landscape, but more aggressive and less atmospheric.
Tom “Fountainhead” Geldschläger finally releases his new album, Reverse Engineering, on August first. It’s very different from his debut, “Fear Is the Enemy”. While FItE was almost like classical music with masterpieces such as Hithérto and I Do and I Will, Reverse Engineering is much more metal, prog metal to be more exact. The fretless guitar is still to the foreground, and as tasty as ever, but the music beneath it is more aggressive, like the debut’s eponymous track. The album is mainly instrumental (except the title track), but features as bonus tracks vocal versions of some songs, featuring singers Gabriel Riccio, Dan Sander, Lotte Schüppler, and Michél Kroll. Each of their performance is stellar, and every song on the album is great, despite the lack of variety when compared to Fear Is the Enemy. Overall, a great album that was very much worth the wait!
Yes, Drench the World in Honey is a concept album on bees. Before dismissing this as silly, hear Slymouse Supreme out. The decline of bee populations is a real threat to the survival of many species and to our quality of life. Every money gathered through this album’s sales will be sent to a charity working for the survival of bees, so if you like the music, please consider dropping a few dollars. One dollar, even a quarter will do. If you cannot, the album is available for free, however. On to the music. It’s a mix of intrumental post-rock and prog rock, filled with spoken word excerpts. Like We Lost the Sea’s new album, it’s very quiet overall yet powerful in its delivery and meaning. A very good album for fans of post-rock music.
Chorus 30 from Blues for the Hitchhiking Dead is, other than a mouthful, the latest album of the chamber math rock band He Was Eaten by Owls. Yes, chamber math rock is a thing, and it’s incredible! Off the top of my head, I’ve got “Thieves’ Kitchen”, which was a chamber prog rock band, but chamber style bands are way underrepresented in the modern prog scene. It’s crossing with math rock was inevitable, but I’m really glad I caught that album, because it’s something special. Nine tracks make up the three parts of the whole, just-below-thirty-minute-eponymous track. It’s truly amazing to hear a string quintet and a woodwinds trio complementing a bared-down rock duo consisting of a drummer-percussionist and a guitarist-multi-instrumentist. You don’t get to hear this every day, and much less playing such quality music, so come prepared, and leave satisfied.
Earthstomper The Second is a fusion prog EP that came out in early Djune. Here, it’s a typical metal trio (guitar, bass and drums) adorned by a keyboardist and a blower, playing saxophone and flute. This gives the band a really varied soundscape, such as can be seen in the first track, “Hatch”, where you’ll go through jazzy atmospheric rock with saxophone, progressive metal with dirty riffs in odd-time signatures, electro-djazz, harpsichord classical/baroque, funk/reggae, and it goes, it goes, it goes… Suffice to say, it’s “this is pretty interesting”, and I recommend you check it out as soon as possible!
Colin Marston’s indescribable side-project, Indricothere, released without warning their new album, III. Consisting of guitar, Warr guitar, and programmed drums (all by Colin), Indricothere goes where his mind errs. This time, it sounds like B-sides from Behold… The Arctopus’s Skullgrid, albeit less progressive and more black, technical metal. In other words, it’s aggressive and weird and pretty short but without a doubt good and worthy of a few listens.
The Most is another band in the lineage of jazzy math rock, which I’ve been a sucker for these times. Their album, At Once, reminds me of a jazzier TTNG, which cannot by any means be a bad thing. The band itself is pretty fleshed out, as it includes synthesizer, auxiliary percussions, horns, and woodwinds. Each song is impressive and surprising at once, and the decent running time of the album is sure to fill your craving. Definitely don’t miss that!
And finally, The I.L.Y’s is a side-project of the famed experimental hip-hop band Death Grips. Scum with Boundaries is their second album, which is available for free on Soundcloud or the band’s website, which is currently offline, probably due to the massive number of requests. While much less experimental than their main band’s music, it’s still plenty strange and intriguing in its own right. A touch of breakcore and rock, and you’ve got something quite a bit out of the ordinary. Check this out, electronic music people!