Album Review: Firmament – A New World If You Can Take It

Band: Firmament | Album: A New World If You Can Take It | Genre: Progressive metal | Year: 2025

From: Canton (OH), USA | Label: Independent

For fans of: Haken, Thank You Scientist, Between the Buried and Me

I don’t claim to like everything. I know there are just certain styles of music which don’t resonate with me for one reason or another. I can articulate why I don’t like some genres (for example, most singer-songwriter stuff), while I struggle to find the words to describe my distaste for other genres (like reggae or ska or calypso; the Caribbean is just not my musical realm). Metalcore and post-hardcore are two styles of music that fall somewhere in between for me. I don’t really like the vocals common to them (and many other “-core” genres), but there’s also something else I can’t quite put my finger on. Despite this, every now and then I find a band that I like that incorporates these elements into their music.

Firmament is an Ohio-based duo that plays an energetic and emotive brand of post-hardcore-influenced progressive metal. Yes, there are elements on this record which don’t tickle me, but there’s still plenty here that I like. And when you handicap this album for my built-in biases, A New World If You Can Take It is quite strong. This review is going to sound more negative than I intend it, but rest assured, I strongly recommend this release.

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Top 50 Prog Albums of 2021, Part 1: 50-26

Welcome to the first installment of The Elite Extremophile’s Top 50 Prog Albums of 2021. This article will cover places 50-26 on my list, with the top half set to follow on Thursday.

As I always say, I’m sure there are some excellent albums not included in my list. This site is a one-man operation (in relation to reviewing, that is; my editors, Kelci and Dan, have been tremendously helpful), and I simply cannot listen to everything that gets released. I also have my personal biases against some rather popular trends in prog, which affected the composition of this list. But if you’ve got recommendations, do not hesitate to shoot them my way.

As I referenced in my Scheduling Note back in November, this list only addresses albums put out between January 2021 and November 2021. Next year’s list will cover December 2021 through November 2022.

Though it felt as if it started off fairly slow, 2021 wound up being a very strong year for progressive rock and metal. Finalizing this list took longer than usual, especially nailing down the specific order.

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Album Review: Between the Buried and Me – Colors II

Band: Between the Buried and Me | Album:Colors II | Genre: Progressive metal | Year: 2021

From: Raleigh, USA | Label: Sumerian Records

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It’s not often I’m this on top of a new release (only three days out!), but BTBAM are one of my favorite bands. They’ve managed to blend death metal and metalcore with the tonal and structural language of progressive rock to forge a distinct niche for themselves.

The decision to do a sequel to their best-known album 14 years after the fact struck many (myself included) as an odd choice, but I did my best to keep an open mind. I don’t pay attention to lyrics, and harsh vocals barely even register as words to me, so if you’d changed the title to something else, I doubt I’d know this was a sequel. It is undoubtedly a BTBAM album, but there’s not much inherently Colors-y about it.

I’m also glad that this album was released whole, unlike the weird, two-part release of Automata. Automata works better as one unified piece, and it’s a full 10 minutes shorter than Colors II. I’ve read some speculation that that may have been due to interference from Sumerian Records. If true, I’m glad they held back from issuing Colors 1.5 and Colors 2. (And side note–why does Sumerian Records have the Sphinx and Pyramids of Giza as their logo? Couldn’t they have used a ziggurat?)

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