Tracklist:
- Prisoner of War
- Patrimony
- Inertia
- Named
- Initiation
- Frontier
- Endurance
- Communion
- Fortification
- Onslaught
- Desolation
- Fear and Trembling
As the
summer sun turns to autumn rain, the good people of this earth demand intergalactic
escapism to deliver them from the terrestrial gloom. And lo!
From the icy wastes of Canada have arrived our saviours: a trio of bright
young sparks returning with their second full-length record of bombastic
space-edged melodic prog-death metal.
Monolith’s superb new album, Voyager, delivers just as much as it
promises, and it’s a lot: zangy synth; battering blastbeats; chugging chords;
and a wild vortex of clean and death-growl vocals.
Monolith are
neither withheld nor shy in their use of sounds. Suitably, for an album (and band) so titled, Voyager
is packed with the emotive strains of the intrepid explorer and their ilk. Ostensibly, this is a death metal album. And all the essentials are present – shouty-shouty
growls, thrashy rhythm guitars, thunderous double-pedal drumming – and ready
for the adventure. But Monolith have not
drawn back, contented with the home comforts of their genre, from sonic
experimentation. The most striking, and
– certainly – appealing, elements of Voyager come in the willingness to engage seriously
with a wide range of sounds.
Synths rule
the day. After the increasingly tired and
impotent orthodoxy of miniature orchestras, which took this millennium’s first
decade of (particularly symphonic) metal by storm, the return of the synth for synth’s
sake, raw, brash, and impudent in all its PVC glory, has been a welcome
one. Amongst recent work by groups such
as Inner Fear and Omnium Gatherum, who have recently done much to
rehabilitate classic synth sounds, Voyager holds its own, with 52 minutes of
synthetic variation which offers more than most metalheads will provide in a
career.
Tracks 7,
Endurance, which opens to pensive pop’n’snap taps before blasting headlong into
a storm of irreverent plastic brass, and 10, Onslaught, whose own lengthy
introduction is dominated by drum-machine beats and zany keyboard work, illustrate
the point most obviously. But tones of digital
creation underpin whole swathes of the album.
A particular strength of the approach is its ability to circumnavigate
the heaving swamps of the keyboard orchestra: the serrated-edged zing which accompanies
the bulk of orchestral tones ensures that crunch takes the place of the usual
slush which has come to be expected of metal symphonies. If we needed reminding of the value of
Monolith’s approach, the jet-lagged and formless cloud of keyboard strings
which appears mid-way through the final track, Fear and Trembling – the first
and last time the band let their guard against such gratuitous mush slip – demonstrates
perfectly the need for definition and edge which pixelated synthesization provide.
While Voyager
benefits enormously from a hard-nosed approach to the use of synthetic sounds, its
real strength – and one which holds the album’s entire novel edifice together –
is a willing naiveté towards the conventions of metal. The result is a completely shameless, utterly
un-self-conscious, and absolutely fresh soundscape which at times wanders freely
across boundaries of genre and style. Trampling
received wisdom of taste underfoot, this flourishes into particularly unabashed
highlights. Tracks 5, Initiation, and 9,
Fortification, sink with serene indifference into foamy, muffled choral themes;
track 7, Endurance, bounces, blissfully ignorant, on boisterous chants of “We
will not die on enemy soil!”; and track 3, Inertia, pirouettes in its own, self-indulgent
company on interweaving guitar solos which rip chunks out of the classical
themes they draw upon.
The sense
that Monolith set out with taste and convention sat firmly in the cross-hairs
is strengthened by Voyager’s melodic content.
The album is, certainly, melodic: clean singing, as per usual these
days, provide a staple of melodious vocal themes while harsh growling sees
melodic themes passed from vocalist to instrumentalist. While clean vocals seem somewhat withdrawn –
melodic ranges are restricted and vocal tones somewhat nasal and tense – a
willingness elsewhere to transfer melodies to guitars and synths allows the
band to revel in often fantastical tunes, some of them way out of the range and
scope of singers, and others –as in the case of track 2, Patrimony – more common
to the homely and vacuous world of pop…
Although it
might easily be overlooked, the almost effortless skill with which the
multitude of different themes and motifs are wound together is well worth a
mention. Performances are as tight (you
might say) as the proverbial space-traveller’s airlock, as rhythm sections
negotiate often highly complex and varied changes of beat and tempo. And shifts from up-tempo to down, and vice
versa, are, for the most part, very accomplished, enabling seamless changes of style
and mood (the end of track 5, Initiation, and the cut-back middle section of
track 7, Endurance, receive particular praise).
The interweaving of instruments, meanwhile, adds a further melodic
dimension and detail to the music, with melodic vocal lines – in a particularly
pleasing twist – frequently tapering off into snaking guitar runs (check out
the middle section of track 1, Prisoner of War, on this front).
Besides the
skill and innovation of the musical composition, Voyager is held together by its
lyrical content, which tells a story of sacrifice, loss, and
self-discovery. These various themes are
woven into a comic book-style storyboard in a highly-stylised fashion. They are not particularly ground breaking – all
key themes could, certainly, be found in any album of the genre – but lyrics
are varied, and the style entertaining, enough to carry the album through with
ease. Metaphors and explanations alike
are of consistently sufficient quality to emotively visualise their ideas: aside
from a faintly surreal anatomical reference to making a stand “on broken legs”
(track 1, Prisoner of War) and the oddly sexualised phrasing “tell the truth
your tongue denies” (track 2, Patrimony), words and meanings converge with
satisfying and effective fluency.
The band
have, in fact, been so kind as to include a lyric sheet in their free (yes,
that’s right, free) album download –
no small help in an age when many still don’t bother furnishing listeners with
words to match sounds. And it all
reveals a very fulfilling progression tying the various themes together,
otherwise lost in the transition from paper to soundwaves: starting at a point
of subjugation, the album rattles through a journey of self-discovery in which
the protagonist fights against others’ expectation to find his true role and
identity. Monolith’s universe, however,
is a violent and unforgiving one, which leads from slavery to liberation, then
on to battle and resistance, and thence back to servitude, completing a full
circle which ties the story into an unending loop. While it offers no great departure from the
standard 20th century modernist canon, it does a terrific job of
holding the whole album together: listening and reading provides a notably more
immersive experience than listening alone.
All elements
of Voyager combine into an experience which is as invigorating as it is
startling. Certainly, its creators have
not made any efforts to avoid fans’ genre-sensitive toes; but the honesty and
lack of self-consciousness with which this record has been constructed would
suggest they are out for more than just cheap kicks at the expense of
conventional taste. Voyager is a work of
craft and guile, and well worth the time and attention its stylistic novelty demands
from its listeners. Monolith’s creation
hitss the nail so firmly on the head that the glorious
sound of supra-terrestrial victory rings throughout the cosmos. Zooooooooooooooooooong!
Production:
4/5
Lyrics: 4/5
Album
cohesion: 5/5
Music: 8/10
Percentage
Score: 84%
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