Our UK contributor Andy Synn returns with another edition of The Synn Report.

A band with a profound, and vastly underrated, influence on many of today’s bands, Norway’s Extol were in many ways the epitome of counter-culture in metal circles at one time. Whereas the majority of their countrymen were quite happy to worship Satan and live out their darkest black metal fantasies, these 5 individuals decided to play a progressive form of technical death/thrash metal with a lyrical bent covering their own shared Christian spirituality. Blasphemy!

Over the course of their career this Norwegian five-piece were never afraid to push the envelope with their sound and playing, their technical skills and song-writing prowess a real testament to their dedicated pursuit of musical perfection and progression. Difficult to precisely define in terms of sound and scene-affiliation, the band is most broadly described as a Progressive Metal band; at times (particularly in the early days) the band were notably extreme.

(more after the jump, including sample songs from Extol’s discography . . .)

Yesterday we frothed at the mouth over The Binary Code, its just-released full-length Suspenson of Disbelief, and the kick-ass “Metal As Art” tour that The Binary Code is about to launch with Hypno5e and NCS favorites, Revocation. In the course of preparing that post, we put a few questions to the band’s guitarist and co-songwriter Jesper Zuretti, and the dude was good enough to indulge us. Yesterday’s post was so damn long that we didn’t want Jesper’s answers to get lost in the rest of our verbiage, so we deferred publication of the interview til today. If you’re already a Binary Code fan or just beginning to get curious about the band, there’s some interesting revelations in there. Read our interview of Jesper after the jump: