(This is the first Part of what projects to be four record-review collections by DGR — collections of multiple reviews that are shorter by his standards than what you usually see from him — all of them intended to clear his slate in preparation for year-end lists to come.)
Here’s how this happens: Inevitably at some point in November, year-end lists start dropping and the reality of the fact that the year is ending suddenly feels more “real”. The compulsion to cover everything begins to vanish and the compulsion to grid everything instead becomes stronger, yet the same imagined debts to bands that you’ve been listening to throughout the year remains.
I swore up and down this year that I wouldn’t do many articles like this and I like to pretend I held to that promise. If I intended to review a band, they received the full investment and treatment, rarely broken out into these articles where the reviews are a little more freeform, freeflowing, and more casually written. It was meant to reflect that I was taking time with these bands, which is why articles like this one tend to frustrate me. For the reader they’re an obvious blessing, given that it’s a much quicker series of recommendations, but it’s a gap I can’t mentally jump just yet.
You’re seeing such a large gathering and attempted archiving of groups for a simple reason: I snapped all these releases up and continued to stumble over more throughout the year. If you were able to keep up with us this year you likely noted a few times where the site was ostensibly on some sort of vacation yet always had some sort of review to run – that was me. I would queue up these huge gatherings of bands and basically backfill the site so that I could, for instance, be in another country and far away from a computer and still contribute something.
As a result you may also have noted that quite a few of these releases came from windows around May and September, which is when the vacations happened this year. You’ll also note I attempted to theme this somewhat once I settled on the fact that I’d be giving up. That’ll all fall to pieces long about the fourth one of these if things go right.
Whenever I do wind up these slate-clearing-style articles though, I always feel the need to apologize to the bands, not because I’m about to take an unholy dump all over your album, but just because I wasn’t able to find the time to fully deep-dive into your releases like I wanted to. I assure you, I listened to them a ton, which is why I do feel confident handing out recommendations, it’s just that the full essay-length deep dive isn’t fully available to me anymore. So again, apologies that these are a little shorter than usual.
Dessiderium – Keys To The Palace
The reasons for covering a band can be manyfold when you consist of well-intentioned chaos like this website does. Sometimes an album will grab you by the neck and refuse to let go until you’re using your pulpit to preach to the masses, while other times something might just fascinate you to the point that you want to see if someone more intelligent can wrap their heads around it. And then you have those that are so avante-garde that they actually do manage to push a genre forward, and sometimes you have albums that are pure junk food and are great for slamming down your face.
On the rare occasion though, you get an album like Dessiderium’s Keys To The Palace that is so jam-packed with ideas and inspiration that you can’t help but share it with the world, because the hope is more that this album will serve as a creative flashpoint for other burgeoning musicians out there, to show that you can give into your wildest indulgences and somehow with enough time and expertise make them work. You can create something massive that is also allowed to have faults, as nothing is truly perfect, but the art of making those parts that aren’t as glossy smooth sound just as much your own, and can be just as interesting as the myriad paths you may lay out before a listener. It is storytelling with all the warts involved.
Musician Alex Haddad – whom you may recognize from time spent in Arkaik and Atheist for instance – is the main driver behind Dessiderium, handling much of the instrumentation, vocal work, and songwriting, save for drum programming and piano on a few songs. It becomes clear when listening to the project’s fifth album Keys To The Palace – released in May via Willowtip Records – that it has transformed into a fascinating creative outlet.
Five albums in and it is clear that Dessiderium is a project with no creative boundaries that it isn’t willing to smash through in pursuit of a song. The difficult act when you have a project like this is that, when all horizons are open to you and you have limitless creative resources to draw from, you’re often at risk of combining too much, or spreading yourself so thin that you’re well in the “wide as an ocean yet deep as a puddle” territory. It’s the creative risk of going through so much effort and combining so many ingredients only to come out of the other end proud of the fact that you’ve created the color beige.
Dessiderium dodges that fault rather deftly, and it is very much appreciated. Keys To The Palace is an album of wild swings any such way, and truthfully so many are taken that the moments wherein things don’t quite work – the enthusiasm delivered on the vocal front sometimes “two ships in the night” passes the resources available – but so much of that is offset by the times wherein Keys to The Palace takes on a dreamlike quality.
The pool of influences here is insanely large and Alex’s history as a tech-death hired gun and wunderkind shines here, though he has made clear efforts for things to not become an indistinct mess of music. In some ways it feels like this was accomplished by channeling Devin Townsend on some of the more ambitious numbers on Keys To The Palace. I certainly noticed it in one of the many multi-part suites on this release, with one specific musical progression seeming to conjure the spirit of the man’s 2006 album Synchestra while the guitar and its many layers of echo makes a vailent reach for the skies and into the heavens.
Yet the tale of the Keys To The Palace remains this: This is an album that is over an hour long and nine songs, yet you never notice it because you are so continually coming across new eye-opening moments that the places where many of these songs sail into the eight minutes and higher ranger doesn’t even register. The crew that had their hands involved in making Keys To The Palace have invested a lot in these songs and it shows. The album may take its lumps at times but the grand ambition of this album far outshines the occasional stumble.
Dessiderium have crafted something magical with this album, adding to a roster of already fantastic progressive metal releases – in death and all forms – that have hit this year.
Omnivide – Arise
The progressive melodeath of Canada’s Omnivide was a much more recent discovery on this end. We ran a premiere for them on this very site but the flood of heavy metal releases has proven immense this year, and amidst drowning in the detritus and mud of the musical landslide that has been 2025 we let the October release of their EP Arise somehow float past us. Not enough that we didn’t see it go by and reach out an arm in dramatic fashion to try and grab it, only to watch it slip out of our fingers at the last second as we sank under the surface.
We are like an enraged spirit unable to let go of the mortal realm however, and thus we cling to our regrets and grudges with the strength of a hydraulic clamp, clawing our way backward to at least provide some words in regards to the records we have touched base with over the years. This one-sided perceived debt will be enough to keep us clinging to the mortal sphere for centuries to come, and lacking an attic, asylum, farmhouse, or well to haunt, we could do just as well trying to square up with some of those debts. We instead lay out the table for twenty-six minutes of Omnivide’s progressive death wanderings on that aforementioned EP Arise.
Credit to the Omnivide crew that even when you think you know what is coming by general genre descriptors the band is inventive enough to keep you on your toes and give you the unexpected. Experience alone would be enough of a guide with a group like Omnivide, and a talent for being able to pick out their musical influences would do well to set expectations for an EP like Arise…you’d think.
When you listen to heavy metal long enough, sometimes the blurring of genres can be just as interesting as the end product, and Omnivide are one of those groups who seem very unrestricted in their style. The tech-death genre does serve as a large boundary point for the band yet they are just as much progressive – both in death, rock, and metal forms – as they are exhibitors of the showy blastbeat-heavy stylings that their logo might lead people to believe. With no real limiters placed on the band, Omnvidie have an interesting blend present on Arise, with four impressively adventurous songs and one movie-score-worthy intro.
There’s enough guitar pyrotechnics alone on the four songs here that they probably can’t play in North America without a permit and fire truck waiting outside, and that doesn’t even account for the equally flashy vocal work, the immense synth lines, or the drum segments that are somehow technically precise yet still loose enough to feel like they’re flying by the seat of their pants. You could do paragraphs alone on the “for fans of” implications that an EP like Arise provides.
Yet it seems that in heavy metal’s infinite wisdom, when we last convened and decided what the shorthand for all these various cocktail mix-esque blends of metal’s ridiculous quantity of subgenres, we somehow came to the conclusion that a lot of people will land in territory occupied by Andorra’s own Persefone. Mayhaps it’s that Omnivide have a very strong melodic ear and don’t mind an Orb Weaver’s intricacy when it comes to writing guitar parts, or letting those previously mentioned keyboard works serve as a melodic buttress to anything crushingly heavy within the core band’s aspirations.
Even in just four songs, Arise covers so much ground that Omnivide are recontextualizing last year’s Tale Of Fire album. It makes for a very potent musical one-two punch with a year-over-year return and you’d be hard pressed to deny just how talented Omnivide come across with material of this caliber. Given that you’ve got five tracks (including the intro) for twenty-six plus minutes of music, Omnivide have plenty of room to put that talent on display as well. Five- to-eight-minute song lengths are the order of the day and this is a release that doesn’t stretch for time. It sees a purpose to each part and places something there. No floating in a reverb-wash or sustained notes, this is layer after layer of music and Arise sounds as if it is four separate mini-adventures that tie together rather neatly by the time the EP closes out.
You’ll notice this because there’s an ever creeping feeling throughout Arise that Omnivide are quite indulgent with their sound. They like to submerge themselves in their ideas and let the artistic muse run wild. Arise seems to float at times while it jumps from an endless wall of solos to quiet meditation to lush keyboard beds layered throughout each song. The band are multifaceted on all fronts, whether it’s vocals or instrumentation, so even with the EP status that Arise may have as its calling card you’ll still feel like you went rounds with a full album by the time it’s done.
Omnivide have an EP here wherein the old axe of continually finding something new to discover finds a good striking point. Even well removed from its release, it’s difficult not to keep pinning down influences and different elements as you gain the sense to see behind the curtain and learn just how the wizard is truly operating. It strikes the interest so often you can’t help but be drawn in.
Omnivide’s Arise was a solid surprise this year. It’s an EP whose artistic bounds far outstretch the sharpened tech-death-appearing logo or the giant which bestrides the Earth, death-metal-styled cover. Omnivide are operating on multiple progressive death metal levels on this EP and to listen to them as they move from moment to moment makes for an exciting experience.
Mechina – Bellum Interruptum
This will likely be the release that sets the record for album we’re most behind on while still within the bounds of the same year. Hell, in the time since the well-intentioned moment of “I’m gonna write me a review about Mechina again!” and the actual sitting down and doing it, the group have released two more singles in the lead-up to the next musical chapter for them. Rest assured though, the efforts of the sci-fi space opera soundtrack by way of metal that is Chicago’s Mechina have not gone completely unnoticed.
We’ve been lax in keeping up to date with the group’s most recent releases but it had seemed for a time that the path they were taking was something markedly different from what we were looking for from them. Gone was the sort of aggression and hostility from the band’s sound, in favor of massive groove and some beautifully clean-sung vocal sections instead, which unfortunately had started to sound a little samey after a while.
No amount of keyboard beds and orchestration will help mask the idea that Mechina had settled into a comfortable groove for themselves. The music was still good enough and the albums that haven’t been covered here still have a shared handful of shining moments, but it seemed that constantly being on the Mechina “beat” was a pursuit finally worth letting go. They found a crowd and sound for themselves, no need to go any further other than pure popcorn enjoyment at that point right?
Save for Bellum Interruptum, which is an album that hasn’t completely shed a lot of what’s been resting on our shoulders when it comes to Mechina, but does sound the most revitalized the band have been in some time, with enough adventure and risk-taking happening within the bounds here that it feels like someone has finally jumped out of the car, pressed up behind it, and is forcing it to move forward.
Released in March of this year, Bellum Interruptum is a gigantic album. It fills in a lot of the spaces that Mechina like to occupy musically but the group have paired the main run of Bellum Interruptum with two of the previous singles they had done, creating a massive work that clocks in at about an hour and a half of music. It cannot be stated lightly enough that this is a lot to take in.
If you have some familiarity with the band’s artistic hallmarks you can rest assurred that Mechina use all of those and more here, but seem to have found a better ratio of aggression to gorgeous and lush musical moments – or at least one that seems to have some vitality in it – than what they had been working with in the past. Singer Mel Rose still sounds wonderous on the album, using a myriad array of vocal effects to accentuate a naturally talented singing voice as is. Tagging in on the harsh vocals is a newly drafted Dave Lowmiller, whose punchy growls well befit the music that Mechina are putting on display here. As a result, all of the constituent parts that make a Mechina album seem to be free again to create an even spread of ass kickers and synth-laden space exploration songs. Because the science fiction story being told has never stopped, it’s just that the events taking place seem to get more granular with each imagined city that is leveled.
The welcome part with Bellum Interruptum is that although Mechina are within a well-refined comfort zone for themselves, there’s still a treature trove of headbangable guitar riff moments on this disc. The planets seem to align just right for Bellum Interruptum at times, and the magic of the movie-quality soundtrack that backs some of the heftier guitar chugging moments still glows radiant white. Bellum Interruptum is an album with a blinding sheen to it that is pieced together through what must be an ungoldy amount of studio work, but the layer of polished artifice is part of what makes Mechina interesting, the sound like a grand space opera and all of the computer-generated special effects that would likely come with it.
When narrowing it down to specific songs though, an interesting problem arises, because it’s difficult to not just recommend groups of tracks, and that feels about as reductive as just saying “listen to the whole album.” It’s a weird shrugging of responsibility, even though listening to this whole album makes for a fun hour and a half. The pairing of “The Plague Pit” and “The Wasteful Energy Of Words” makes for a solid combination that’ll knock someone flat and then resurrect them in ten minutes early in the album, but the titular “Bellum Interruptum” is a musical journey all its own. It’s a weighty one too, as one of a handful of songs that punch the clock at over ten minutes, but there’s “wow” to be had at all the musical fireworks on display in that song which makes it worth the time. Closer “The Overwhelming Harmony of Collective Suffering” is equally interesting but only half the time.
And that’s only four songs. The version of Bellum Interruptum that the band have posted now is eleven tracks long, and even the two singles that serve as a prequal to the current story have had a production pass on them, bringing them in line with the current track listing. It’s a tremendous amount of chunky riffwork and heavenly symphonics to take in, but this is also the most “vital” that Mechina have felt in a while. The band are purposefully opaque about things that happen behind the scenes so you can never quite guess where the group will be headed next, but with Bellum Interruptum they’ve struck onto something that is bright enough to be seen from other planets. Here’s to hoping that they find enough inspiration to continue down this path for a few before they chase the next starship to whatever wormhole it may be careening toward.