Irreversible Mechanism made a strikingly good impression on us in 2018 when Blood Music released their second album, Immersion. For one, my comrade DGR lavishly reviewed the album and then positioned it at No. 8 on his year-end list. In his assessment, the band moved from “the ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ style of writing in their debut album” toward “something that sounds like a head-on collision of Fallujah, Rivers Of Nihil, and a handful of other post-metal groups currently working on the fringes of the tech-death scene”.
And for another, I added a track from Immersion to the 2018 edition of our Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. It wasn’t an album that I initially expected to be a contender for that award, because it’s such a massive record, not only in its length but also in its near-constant all-out assault on the senses, so densely packed with ideas that it lends itself to new discoveries every time you dive back into the hurricane. Given that the songs also tend to flow into each other, it’s also an album that’s probably best experienced in a single session, and it’s tough to carve out individual tracks from the one that preceded or followed it. Nevertheless, the more time I spent with the album, the more addicted to it I became and the more convinced I became that something from the album belonged on the list.
And now we have the opportunity, two years later, to revisit the music of this talented group from Minsk, Belarus. They’ve made a play-through video for a song named “Footprints in the Sand” that appears dead-center in Immersion’s track-list, whose lyrics have an eerily prescient connection to our current pandemic age, and it’s our pleasure to share it with you today.
“Footprints in the Sand” wasn’t the song I chose for our 2018 Most Infectious list (the one I chose was “Existence II: Collision“), but it could have been, even though it’s one of the album’s longest songs and, as DGR wrote, marks “a return to the hurricane sound of the first few songs on the album”. But there are wondrous melodies in the song that are never far away, and they give it a dreamlike quality that pairs wonderfully well with all the head-spinning pyrotechnics.
The crystalline, echoing melodic tones at the outset of the song create a mesmerizing way of moving into what turns into a fast, fleet-fingered, adrenaline-fueled extravaganza. Yet the mysterious ringing melodies of the song are as much a part of why it’s so captivating as the technical guitar acrobatics, the hard-hitting percussion, and the nimble bass lines. The music flashes and flickers, darts and meanders, and becomes vicious and attacking — as well as fluid, sublime, and glorious.
The band shift gears frequently as they lead you through the twists and turns of this otherworldly musical labyrinth, and make room for a great bass solo too. And on top of all that, the vocal tandem of savage growls and attractive singing works very well and is in keeping with the multi-faceted nature of the music.
In addition to the song itself being such a big attention-grabber, the video is great too, because it gives us a chance to watch the band’s three string-slingers doing their thing, and that’s a whole lot of fun. (I’m pretty sure DGR will forgive them for ending the video performance before the long closing passage of the recorded track that includes a sample of Morpheus from The Matrix.)
We hope that Irreversible Mechanism are at work on something new to brighten our dismal days, but in the meantime Immersion remains a highly enjoyable thrill-ride, and you can check it out in its entirety at Bandcamp.
BANDCAMP:
https://blood-music.bandcamp.com/album/immersion
FACEBOOK:
https://www.facebook.com/IrreversibleMechanism