Album Review: Krallice – Crystalline Exhaustion

Band: Krallice |Album:Crystalline Exhaustion | Genre: Progressive metal, Black metal | Year: 2022

From: Queens, USA | Label: Independent

For fans of: Kayo Dot, Kekal, Mgła

Krallice, a New York-based quartet, are stalwarts of the experimental/progressive black metal scene. From their self-titled debut in 2008 to now, they have consistently put out high-quality music, and each album has had its own distinctive hallmarks.

Crystalline Exhaustion is the band’s eleventh full-length release. I haven’t listened to their previous album (2021’s Demonic Wealth), but I did enjoy their 2020 release, Mass Cathexis. Crystalline Exhaustion continues in their general vein of spaced-out, proggy black metal.

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Album Review: Jethro Tull – The Zealot Gene

Band: Jethro Tull | Album:The Zealot Gene | Genre: Hard rock, Progressive rock (I guess) | Year: 2022

From: Blackpool, UK | Label: Inside Out Music

Bandcamp

After the better part of two months of writing nothing, I’m back! The first half of January was all my best-of-2021 stuff, after which things got really busy at work, and then Pokémon Legends: Arceus came out (that took up and continues to take up a lot of my free time). But anyway, you don’t come here for my personal goings-on; you come here for reviews of albums that came out several months ago in an unpopular music genre!

For the record, I was actually pretty quick with covering this one. Jethro Tull has put out their first album since 2003! (Though their Bandcamp seems to ignore their 2003 release, The Jethro Tull Christmas Album, as it states this is their first album in “over two decades,” which signals that Ian Anderson considers 1999’s Dot Com to be the last proper Tull album.)

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Album Review: Cynic – Ascension Codes

Band: Cynic | Album: Ascension Codes | Genre: Progressive metal, Progressive rock, Jazz-fusion | Year: 2021

From: Miami, USA | Label: Season of Mist

Bandcamp

Cynic is one of my absolute favorite progressive metal bands. They’ve got a singular sound that weaves together death metal, jazz, and astral progressive rock. Though they have drifted away from explicit death metal after their 1993 debut, their evolution has been natural, and they’re still recognizably the same band.

Ascension Codes is the band’s fourth full-length album and the first since the untimely deaths of founding drummer Sean Reinert and longtime bassist Sean Malone. These two are sorely missed, but the musicians assembled by guitarist/vocalist Paul Masvidal pay fitting tribute to the unique styles and incredible skills of their predecessors. Notably, instead of utilizing a bass guitarist, the bass parts here are all played on a synthesizer, which lends a unique character to this album in the context of Cynic’s discography.

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Album Review: Creature – Eloge de l’Ombre

Band: Creature | Album:Eloge de l’Ombre | Genre: Progressive metal, Avant-garde metal | Year: 2021

From: Bretagne, France | Label: I, Voidhanger Records

For fans of: Arcturus, Cynic, Öxxö Xööx

Bandcamp

France has long embraced a distinct weirdness and experimentalism in their rock music. Magma are probably the most germane example for this site, though there was a whole microcosm of uniquely French prog acts in the ‘70s, such as Ange, Memoriance, and Mona Lisa. This spirit can be seen today in numerous extreme metal acts, like the bizarre symphonics of Öxxö Xööx or blackgaze pioneers Alcest.

Creature, the one-man project of Raphaël Fournier, has put out a striking, bold release that continues in this tradition of adventurous Francophone rock and metal. (It’s also another strong release from Italy-based experimental metal label I, Voidhanger; I strongly recommend checking out their catalogue.) The music is dense and replete with synthesized vocals and engaging rhythms. Fournier is also quite verbose, demonstrating downright Springsteenian levels of wordiness. So, if you speak French, there’s likely a lot for you to analyze here.

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Album Review: Kayo Dot – Moss Grew on the Swords and Plowshares Alike

Band: Kayo Dot | Album:Moss Grew on the Swords and Plowshares Alike | Genre: Progressive metal, Gothic metal | Year: 2021

From: Brooklyn, USA | Label: Prophecy Productions

For fans of: maudlin of the Well, Kekal, Neurosis

Bandcamp

Kayo Dot are back with their tenth full-length release two years after the totally-okay Blasphemy. That album continued the band’s recent trend away from metal and toward Gothic rock with some experimental leanings. Kayo Dot has always been difficult to nail down with precise genre descriptors, frequently operating in nebulous grey areas between assorted experimental rock and metal subgenres.

Bandleader Toby Driver has often worked with a rotating crew of musicians for Kayo Dot, but for Moss Grew on the Swords and Plowshares Alike, he recorded with the original lineup of his previous band, the critically-beloved maudlin of the Well. The musicianship is expectedly top-notch, and the fusion of experimental metal with subtler influences is sublime. This might just be my new favorite Kayo Dot record.

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Album Review: Regal Worm – The Hideous Goblink

Band: Regal Worm | Album:The Hideous Goblink | Genre: Progressive rock | Year: 2021

From: Sheffield, UK | Label: Republic of Music

For fans of: Caravan, Diagonal, Egg, Wendy Carlos

Bandcamp

Regal Worm is a solo project by Jarrod Gosling, one half of the duos I Monster (trip-hop) and Cobalt Chapel (psychedelic rock). Regal Worm blends Gosling’s usual psychedelic leanings with more progressive and ambitious song structures. His last release under this moniker, 2018’s Pig Views, was my favorite album that year, so I naturally had high hopes for this release.

The album cover for The Hideous Goblink lives up to its name. It is an ugly piece of art and not nearly as enchanting as the art on his past releases. However, this is an instance where that old axiom about book covers and judging them holds true. Regal Worm’s fourth full-length release is a fantastic collection of songs which sound like one unified whole. The six compositions here all work in harmony with each other to deliver something fantastic.

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Album Review: Dream Theater – A View from the Top of the World

Band: Dream Theater | Album:A View from the Top of the World | Genre: Progressive metal | Year: 2021

From: Boston, USA | Label: Inside Out Music

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Well, it’s been two years. Time for a new Dream Theater album. A View from the Top of the World is the too-many-th release from these prog metal stalwarts. After the passable but unremarkable Distance over Time, I wasn’t really expecting much from these guys. Then again, I didn’t get into them until I was in college, after their prime, so I’ve never really expected much from them.

Dream Theater has their very specific sound, and with the exception of the bafflingly terrible The Astonishing, they have been super consistent and predictable. Everything is always masterful from a technical standpoint. However, it often comes off as soulless, and I frequently point to Jordan Rudess and John Petrucci as some of the most masturbatory musicians in the notoriously onanistic field that is prog metal. Much of their output over the last two decades has been uninspired, but now and again we have gotten the occasional flash of brilliance.

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Album Review: Nolan Potter – Music Is Dead

Artist: Nolan Potter | Album:Music Is Dead | Genre: Progressive rock, Psychedelic rock | Year: 2021

From: Austin, USA | Label: Castle Face Records

For fans of: early Frank Zappa, Foxygen, Ty Segall, Once and Future Band

Bandcamp

Nolan Potter is a Texas-based multi-instrumentalist, and Music Is Dead is his second full-length release. His 2019 debut was a strong collection of tracks which blended together a healthy melange of influences, like psych, folk, pop, prog, and experimental music. Music Is Dead further improves on that strong debut, and Potter demonstrates some serious instrumental and compositional chops.

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Album Review: Yes – The Quest

Band: Yes | Album: The Quest | Genre: Soft rock, Progressive rock | Year: 2021

From: London, UK | Label: InsideOut Music

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Yes have returned after a seven-year absence to deliver an album no one was asking for. 2014’s Heaven and Earth was a terrible, ignominious end to Chris Squire’s impressive career. That record sounded like Air Supply doing a Yes cover album. In a contemporaneous review on my personal Facebook page, I remarked that that album “… is beyond bland. It makes milk seem spicy. This is beyond paint-by-numbers. This has less soul than a ginger.”

Unfortunately, The Quest continues in a pretty similar vein to its predecessor. This album is an improvement over their last release, but that is a pretty low bar to clear. Yes brings absolutely nothing new to the table here. The ills which plagued Heaven and Earth also hobble The Quest, a trend which seems to imply that there are inherent problems with this version of the band.

Vocalist Jon Davison appears to be a big part of the problem, but he’s not the only problem. As much as I would love to blame Glass Hammer (Davison’s former band and my favorite contemporary prog punching bag) for all of Yes’s ills, I cannot do so in good faith. Some of the worst songs on the album were written solely by longtime Yes guitarist Steve Howe.

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Album Review: Diagonal – 4

Band: Diagonal | Album: 4 | Genre: Progressive rock, Space rock | Year: 2021

From: Brighton, UK | Label: Cobblers Records

For fans of: The Soft Machine, Gong, Hawkwind

Bandcamp

Diagonal had a quick turnaround between this album and their previous release, 2019’s Arc. Compare that timeline to the five-year gap between their self-titled debut and their sophomore album, or to the seven-year hiatus following that. Needless to say, I’m glad they’re putting out music at a brisker pace than they have in the past

I’m also glad that 4 is an improvement over Arc. Arc wasn’t bad by any means, but good chunks of it felt unfocused or needlessly drawn-out. On this new release, the band sounds energized and full of new ideas, and that musical vigor shines through in the five compositions present here.

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