(Our writer DGR has been playing catch-up on records released earlier this year when other distractions interfered with writing about them. In mid-July he delivered Issue One (which you can find here), and now we have Issue Two, encompassing reviews of four records released in March, May, June, and July.)
It is politics season here in California, which means that by living in proximity to the state’s capital (Sacramento) you get battered relentlessly with ads from all neck of the woods. Over thirty-five million people live within the boundaries of California, which means that this metro area consisting of a mere two-to-three million means fuck-all to anyone internationally and is barely important enough to list on a map. You have to zoom in two or three times on Google, for instance, before Sacramento is revealed unto the wider world and long after Los Angeles and San Francisco.
By virtue of growing up in the Bay Area I’ve found my wider allegiances between the two regions fairly split, such that I kind of equally care for both even though my current residence will forever suffer from a generationally-instilled case of short-man’s syndrome. It’s why politics season tends to be annoying, because you get to hear your city’s name with the same sort of thin-mouthed sneer that is usually reserved for the scum of the Earth, such that even when filling up your gas tank you get greeted with banners pointing to the price of fuel and a notice that “Sacramento policies did this”.
Which I guess is nice, because at least the rest of the country is finally acknowledging that California is the real capital of this country, and clearly, we’re the ones who decided to start bombing the Middle East again and start a new forever war. It’s a fucked up way of finding that sort of thing out, but I guess anything to mask your consistent rape of the consumer wherein your prices don’t line up at all with what you claim, and by virtue of this state having more drivers than most anywhere else, is most often used to goose your profit margins so that we end up paying way more than “Sacramento policies” might’ve caused.
Unless all of the oil companies have somehow relocated to this state as well and we missed it (given the general economic state of Sacramento’s downtown area you’d understand why I would miss such a thing). But, I understand why you would want to, given that we live in opposite country and we just do the exact opposite of everything we claim we’re doing and then take credit as if we’re doing the initial thing. So, I look forward to the eventual employment boon to California as well as the tax revenue because somehow US50 is going to get “fixed” and at this point it is likely going to take the Vatican’s treasury as well as its primary deity to actual pull that off.
What this means is that musically we find ourselves at an equally weird place. More avant-garde and aggrieved than one might expect, as the world’s sort of unreality that surrounds you never seems to cohere into anything that makes sense. Every day feels like opening a door only to get greeted by someone armed with a bullshit leaf-blower on full blast. It’s why you’ve likely noticed that these artists aren’t necessarily grouped by any particular theme. It’s moreso a determination that they must be spoken about and we would be bereft in our duties not to do so. That they came out months prior means nothing, because every opportunity to inject a little bit of life into a release for the sake of discovery is one that must be taken.
Thus we bounce evermore on our quest to speak on everything that I’ve been exploring since returning home from our vacation festivities – just before work completely sideswiped any semblance of a normal existence that I could’ve pretended to have.
Ram-Zet – Sapien
The wild musical collective that is Norway’s Ram-Zet had been silent for a long time up until the release of this year’s Sapien album. Near-fourteen years in fact. To put that in perspective: Ram-Zet’s last release – the group’s fifth album Freaks In Wonderland – arrived in January of 2012, not even four or five months after I washed up on the shores of this very website. Obviously, I missed the band back then. Not even in a sort of “two ships passing in the night” scenario, as much as Ram-Zet were orbiting the planet and I was too busy chasing squirrels into a local field.
My musical headspace was completely different back then, even though I had heard of the name via fellow writing cohorts, and it would take me years to actually dive into what the band and their approach to music had been up to. In fact, the release of Sapien this year lays closer to my beginning explorations of the band than the traversal of time in the other direction. In a weird way, I benefit then, because I’m not one who found myself waiting a decade-plus for a pulse of life from the band. It was just like any other musical release that came out this year, just an all of a sudden “wait there’s new music by who?!” sort of surprise and et voilà, we had new Ram-Zet.
Which also is a roundabout way of saying that we now get to experience something people also haven’t done in a long time, which is attempt to explain just what the hell Ram-Zet are doing. This not being the first time when I’ve had to place a band in this exact situation should mean we’ll have an easier time with it, right?
We write about bands like Ram-Zet every once in a while not because we think they’re going to be the biggest breakthrough in the world of music but because they’re a group that’ve existed so long and been so uncompromising in their sound that the Ram-Zet machine exists entirely by force of will. It exists because the musicians involved believe in the musical circus act, and unleashing it upon the general public is a secondary effect vs the act of writing and recording the smorgasbord of ideas present to begin with.
In a way, you hope that by spreading the word of an album like Sapien – or hell, the discography prior to it – that you’re helping to inspire a new generation of musicians and weirdos who will eventually find their own path to merge their inspirations and musical ideas together. It’s a generational launch-point in that regard, such that eight or nine bands down the line perhaps the original name may be forgotten but there is enough of a DNA throughline in whatever exciting idea is currently taking the metal world by storm that you could walk backward to something like this.
Or it’s just that Ram-Zet’s indulgent circus act masked as music is so oddly fascinating that it becomes a meme unto itself, ready to spread from person to person. It is both a sign of quality and a sign of how strange it is that even months after the release of Sapien we’re not entirely sure – but that has to be worth points on the board as well, right?
The group’s sixth overall album includes a lot of music. With a runtime that napkin math shows me reaches an hour-ten-plus, it is safe to say that – and granted this comes from the wisdom of multiple listens as well – Ram-Zet left very few indulgences behind. The band have had quite a history while being hilariously difficult to pin down to just one specific style, tossed like a rock through someone’s window into the “I can’t think about this anymore” catch-all that becomes the avant-garde sphere.
The band have at times been goth-metal-associated just as much as they’ve taken from folk, black metal, and straightforward classic heavy metal. Again, given the arsenal of musicians within their overall roster, could you blame Ram-Zet for having the musical attention span of an overly sugared child when it comes to genre-choices available? The more impressive part is that in all of that time the band have found multiple ways to at least produce something semi-cohesive if not remarkably focused on just how strange it can be.
Ram-Zet take joy in being delightfully weird and that sort of delight does embed itself within the experimental structures and atmospheres of Sapien as a whole. Ram-Zet tackle a multitude of subjects and ideas throughout the album, and if it seems as if the band are just floating above the orb of insanity, ready to embrace and unleash it at any point, then you’re probably closer to understanding the wide-eyed adventurism that is the band’s newest album. It does nothing for anyone when your closest comparison point might actually be the spaceship Arcturus crew because then you’re still left with “well, they’re fucking bizarre too!”.
Most of the songs on Sapien range around seven minutes in length, and the best way to describe Ram-Zet’s approach on Sapien is to say that the band put every ounce of energy they have into filling that time. They’re not a band known for long, drifting, ambient passages but instead are constantly chasing different indulgences and ways to tie songs back around to ideas they’d been hinting at within the beginning of a specific track. Ram-Zet are effectively putting on a musical acrobatics act, such that the one time you do get a song that is closer to the five-minute range it almost feels weirder than the bubble of “weird” you’ve already been embedded in.
Ram-Zet like their off-kilter approaches and mania-induced tendencies, so “Peace25?” boiling down to being one of those ambient and drifting instrumental passages for five-minutes-plus is a fun inversion on what the band had been doing prior as they darted among multi-faceted vocal approaches in songs like “Cranium” and “Sleepers”. The fully re-armed and operational bits of oddball swing and rocking intensity that appears afterward in “As Worlds Collide” better speaks as a reminder of what you’d been experiencing, as the sudden interruptions of heaviness occur in music that initially seemed like a mostly clean-sung and harmonized operetta of a song. Then, with eight minutes available to them, you could probably spend paragraphs lost in this one song verses the hour-plus of music on the album.
Yet it’s the tracks like “Hangmans Jazz” – which closes the album – “In The Mirror”, “Psychosis”, and “Zerocane” that can be the draw of an album like Sapien just because they’re the ones wherein all of that experimentation and multi-instrumentation fully coheres. Sapien being the strange beast of an album that it is makes way for Ram-Zet to be prog-rock just as often as they are metal, especially when the band make more and more room for the violin to be integral to any particular song. While always a longtime calling card of the band, by the time you’re deep into the back half of Sapien, Ram-Zet have honed down to a fine point just how to fold all of its differing elements into these endlessly traveling songs.
By continually chasing their indulgences and remaining as stubbornly bizarre and “them” as they have ever been, Ram-Zet have created an album after so long away that is just as much for themselves as it is for fans of the band. Sapien is an exercise in a group strapping themselves into a funhouse rollercoaster for an hour, and mostly, you’re along for the ride. It’s an impressive act to pull off when it feels like you’re experiencing the labyrinthian twists and turns each one of these songs takes – especially once the keyboards make themselves known, infinite font of sound that they can be – at the same time the band themselves are.
There’s more discovery going on here than the traditional transactional communication that music can play out to be. What you wind up finding out about yourself by the end of the hour-plus that Sapien asks of you, outside of the tremendous endurance needed to hang with the band every step of the way, may be just as delightfully strange as what you’ve learned about the band themselves. It’s the reckless fascination of “what can we get away with” that keeps Sapien interesting, and after so long away, it makes for a fun introduction to this band again.
Now, we can begin to debate whether I’m inflicting the band upon you just to imagine how wide-eyed you’ll come out on the other side, or introducing them to you because I think you’ll be emerging on the other end the same way.
https://www.facebook.com/ramzetcertified/
Cipher System – Torn Between Realities
While these collectives are often gargantuan bags of albums that were released many months ago, sometimes it is fun to shift a few things around in favor of something more recent. Those other releases will be reached eventually and these things shift around all the time as the different regions of my brain light up about which release it has thoughts about in that moment. In this case we’re looking at something that came out on July 31st – but one has to figure with Ram-Zet elsewhere in this collection, one decade-plus gap between releases surely deserves another, right?
Not that long gaps weren’t something Cipher System fans were familiar with to begin with, given that prior to the current fifteen-year stretch, there had been seven between full-lengths up to that point.
It’s wild to think that this isn’t even the first time I’m saying this in today’s collection, but the last time Cipher System had material out was right about the time I had started writing for this site. One of a legion of melodeath projects with keyboard-happy guitar leads, Cipher System were always a somewhat underrated purveyor of the uber-catchy and distinctly-heavy melodeath tree. Of course there were any number of reasons why the iron never struck for them, given that they were also part of the era wherein melodeath had basically crystalized into one form and since then had started to adapt much of its sound into metalcore flavorings as well. The sort of amorphous genre-blur and existence as one of the easier entry-level subsets of extreme metal to get into resulted in a lot of bands in the mid-aughts being unable to find perch where they would’ve been perfectly fine in the beginning of the 2000s.
Cipher System never let that chip away at their ambition though, as their two full-lengths were solid and enjoyable, even as 2011’s Communicate The Storms got a little faceless in its riffing at times. So, even though the band have never been in an “inactive” form officially, it’s fair to say that Cipher System did enter a period of inactivity up until this year saw the release of their new EP, Torn Between Realities.
It makes sense too, given that lineup shifting can wear on a project, and the three gentlemen making up the current incarnation of Cipher System found themselves increasingly busy in the time between. Both Heric and Johan are a part of the excellent Night Crowned, and anything involving vocalist Christian Älvestam is likely up against some headwinds, as even in a time less prolific than before, he has still kept busy behind the microphone since joining the lineup in 2020.
As unfair as it sounds, I honestly had not expected new music from this incarnation of Cipher System, just a solidifying of a live lineup and the occasional show. That they were able to jam together six songs for Torn Between Realities is as pleasant a surprise as could’ve come, especially when they’re playing something that is as if they never left. Resuming where they left off, just with a more practiced ear for melody and with a weapon for a vocalist, Cipher System may not be the most boundary-breaking group out there at the moment but that doesn’t rob Torn Between Realities from being an enjoyable effort on any front. Few bands out there could answer Trent Reznor’s inquest of “Don’t you know what you are?!” all the way back from 2005’s “With Teeth” quite as easily as Cipher System could nod and go “yes, absolutely”.
Yet I will also own up to being well within that realm of self-actualization. A release like Torn Between Realities is like inhaling a bucket worth of pixie-stix powder in one breath and letting the senses be fully overwhelmed. “Endveiler” travels through its near-five minutes – blessed be our lord Napkin Math and all it provides – like it is knocking out a greatest hits of everything its individual musicians are known for, whether it be face-collapsing sweet keyboard leads or equally sugary vocals at times.
“Endveiler” has the difficult act of welcoming people back to the Cipher System fold – the “in summation” act – as well as laying the groundwork for the five songs to follow, so that way the surprising heaviness of “For Reasons Unknown” doesn’t suddenly appear out of nowhere after the listener would’ve initially expected a more melodically-minded singalong. It’s the shift between the two that is commonplace in melodeath as a genre but perhaps due to this being a release that was in the forge for a while ala Disarmonia Mundi’s most recent album, they’re more than capable of music that would otherwise ring hollow and bend it into a well-crafted blueprint. Like mentioned before, Cipher System aren’t breaking boundaries here, but what they are very good at is crafting within lines that’ve been defined through years of experience.
“Nox Elegy” is an instrumental closer, so you can semi-guess that you’re in for some general calm pleasantry to close the release out, but we would also be shooting ourselves in the foot if we didn’t touch upon the wider-work of “Answer To My Pain”, because any time a band gives themselves over six minutes of music to play with you can expect they’re going to cover a lot of ground. “Answer To My Pain” is Cipher System’s answer to the sort of prog-melodeath epic that Christian Älvestam’s other projects are known for. Fans of the journeys that were taken when Miseration and Solution .45 were more active will likely find a lot to like within “Answer To My Pain”. Cipher System traverse a lot of ground within that song, absorbing many of the ideas that had comfortably wrapped themselves around Torn Between Realities as a whole. Multi-faceted, multi-layered, and near multi-genre at times… it is highly likely that if your first experience of the EP as a whole isn’t colored largely by your impression of “Endveiler” than it will be colored by this song effectively becoming the back-half of the EP.
Cipher System are a band whose lineup are more than capable of being relentlessly and world-shatteringly heavy; all of their other projects now have track records that more than prove it. Cipher System’s resurrection, then, is their playground to write a bunch of infectious earworms, decently heavy without being overwhelming, with catchy choruses and the occasional progressively minded exploration.
They are criminally good at hammering melodic lines into many of their songs, and even among the six that make up Torn Between Realities, you’ll find yourself noticing just how many of them are shared between guitars, keys, and vocals. Sometimes they echo one another, oftentimes they are layered into one of the sweetest bites of musical cake you could imagine. Other times that synthesis of keyboard and guitar lead is enough to make the Dark Tranquillity crew turn green with envy. Torn Between Realities is a great realization of a well-established musical blueprint and Cipher System craft every song so that you almost never feel as if you can sense the gears of the greater songwriting machine turning, and that is an impressive act all its own.
https://www.facebook.com/ciphersystem/
Soulburn – Quantifying Cosmic Doom
It’s not often that you wind up picking an album out of sheer curiosity only to find out just how deep a band’s history runs. Such was the case with Soulburn and their new album Quantifying Cosmic Doom – released in mid-June of this year.
I would never dare act as an all knowing figure of heavy metal, and often when writing about albums I will have six or seven tabs open just to make sure I have my proverbial shit straight when it comes to talking about things – even then I’m still prone to doing the Sideshow Bob act multiple times over the course of a few paragraphs – yet I honestly cannot claim that I discovered Soulburn off of the group’s shared DNA and history with Asphyx. Instead, I took the more enlightened path of discovery and arrived at Quantifying Cosmic Doom because I thought the album art looked cool.
I could make basic guesses that I was due for some cosmically progressive approach to music, especially given the astronomy nerdiness needed to understand a few of the surface-level references across the album – example “M87 – What Hopes To Be Born?” – but other than that I was going in fairly blind. What I got was a genre-spanning exploration of the void, heavily rooted in death metal’s groove and doom metal’s slow timbre and massive clean-sung epic passages, with outside forces insisting on their own incursions so that the music would never be purely one thing for an hour-plus worth of run time.
Quantifying Cosmic Doom is a burly monster of an album to make first introductions with. Having no real familiarity with the group up to this point – and honestly, having the impression that based upon the current lineup we’re dealing with an entirely different Soulburn than what this project initially sought to be – means that the blindfold removal of what this album is could best be compared to attending a speed-dating event and having the person placed in front of you turn out to be a professional weightlifter who smashes the table.
It’s not all brutality, but Soulburn use their approach to the cosmos to create something suitably dense enough that it generates its own gravitational pull. Even the song titles on this release hint toward an “all roads lead to death and doom” take on music by being a mouthful in their own right. Quantifying Cosmic Doom is singularly determined to declare to all just how singular it is as an album. At one glance they could be a void-obsessed Candlemass or Pentagram and at other times they’ll be tearing their way through arena-rock-worthy riffs ala Rotting Christ with grunted vocals that sound inhuman. Quantifying Cosmic Doom’s music is a tale of multiple protagonists locked in battle for a chance to speak on the microphone.
What then do we do with this humongous grab bag of grandiose doom guitar, death metal punchiness, prog-rock ambience, and a multitude of other smaller influences? You ram them all into one album with the force of otherworldly impact. That’s exciting, as Soulburn are drawing as much from the well of artists that have made cavernous death metal their home as they are the aforementioned doom heroes and other artists altogether different from where Soulburn’s initial goals may have taken them and dragging it through their own filter, such that it emerges sounding completely different.
If you’ve been traversing death metal’s underground and its extreme proclivities you’ll recognize many of the cues, calling cards, and tropes that Soulburn are deploying, but the music emerges mutated enough upon contact with the band that outside of basic genre descriptors, Quantifying Cosmic Doom maintains enough individuality to be worth its epic album title, song titles, and song lengths. One does not reach an hour in length across eleven songs without rocketing past the five-minute mark more often than not. You might equally spot all of the classic doom and even some trad-metal proclivities, especially in album opener “The Braveheart Of Nightmare”, a rollicking song that in no way hints at the sort the confluence of musical activity that is in the song following, “Powehi, the Embellished Dark Source of Unending Creation”.
Every song on Quantifying Cosmic Doom is its own labyrinthian collective of twists and turns with almost all of them taking fascinating form by the time the song wraps up. Whether it’s the truly epic reaches of songs like “Down Among The Stars” and “The Desolationist” in the latter half of the album – even though the songs themselves stay well within Soulburn’s median of around five minutes – or the more upfront and vicious songs like “A Pyramid Absurd” or highlight song “An Impious Journey Through the Cathedral’s Mouth”.
Quantifying Cosmic Doom is an album whose many facets are hard to not be drawn towards. They may all be separate tracks, but as one larger whole, the collective of music is a hell of a musical journey. The buffet of ideas and influences that Soulburn put on display here more than make the journey of an hour-plus an interesting one. Whether you’re in the market for miserable, soul-crushing doom, martial death metal, soaring vocals with a lot of leather-borne trad influence, or even the occasional black metal passage, Quantifying Cosmic Doom will have it on offer at some point in its journey through cosmogeny and mythology. It is just as much quality as it is quantity and a stunner of a release that is worth digging into.
https://www.facebook.com/OfficialSoulburn/
Halysis – Of Static Slumber
We’ve spoken of Finland’s Halysis before – in fact it’s how the band’s name stayed on my radar – back in 2023 when we posted about the then-recent release of their second album Unbury The Sun. Halysis have been releasing music since 2020, with a smattering of singles, two albums, and an EP to their name, yet they still strike me as a young project, something free to experiment with their sound as they haven’t felt the need to settle into any groove yet that works for them.
Diving into their collected musical works then is world-spanning as you jump from core melodeath influence to proper metalcore influences to something more prog-metal aligned, no ground in between left untrod. Each release exists as a picture of Halysis’ priorities at the time as well as where they were planning to grow next. It’s the evolutionary jumps that can keep a band like this interesting, as they’ve already passed the first test of maintaining solid quality music to begin with. That is why, two and a half years removed from their brave early-December release of Unbury The Sun, I found myself at Halysis‘ doorstep again, having learned that they had put out an EP titled Of Static Slumber at the tail end of May this year.
Five songs and nearly thirty minutes of music is a welcome change in comparison to some of the beefier offerings that’ve been in this sort of round-up, but it should also be said that just because it feels like this EP is a more compact experience does not necessarily translate to a condensed or “short” seeming one. Halysis have cast themselves as captains of their own musical vessels here and are off to find lands yet uncharted, and so the music on Of Static Slumber has a tendency to wander. It starts straightforward as could get with both “A Fleeting Memoir” and “When My End Was Bestowed” rotating between melodeath and metalcore tendencies – including frequent vocal interchanges between a chest-pounding bark and an attempt to soar to the sky in clean singing mode – and Halysis keep the wheels turning just enough that it never quite settles on either.
There’s enough dynamics in play on those first two songs while the band are laying groundwork for their overarching concept that you can sense where the band are making solid plays at weaving them altogether, such that Of Static Slumber doesn’t quite give the impression of just being a collection of five songs. Granted, the current artistic wave seems to be many bands turning their one lengthy song into a multi-part suite but there’s never a sense that Halysis are stretching to fill time or shoehorn anything in on Of Static Slumber. Things are organic and cohere well enough that you could take a listen to this EP’s closing eight-minute title track and then the near-four-minutes of “For I Shall Prosper” and be aware they’re from the same release.
It’s that back-half collision of ideas and influences that makes Of Static Slumber such an interesting listen. As the record grows into its ultimate ending form across this release’s five songs you begin to hear the wider scope of what Halysis had in mind. The initial offerings on Of Static Slumber are enjoyable, hovering steadily into that three-to-four minute range, but Halysis in full progressive-metal, and yes, some of it by way of Between The Buried And Me at times, during the EP’s titular “Of Static Slumber” song, is an intriguing beast in its own right. Of Static Slumber flips on itself halfway through the release with Halysis going beyond a good ear for melody into music that is subtly more technically oriented than you would guess.
It’s that growth into fully expansive prog-metal songs – still with that keyboard-laden melodeath influence in the wings alongside a metalcore guitar chug to stitch things together – that will have Of Static Slumber making it seem as if time is just flying by. That “blink and it’s over” effect is magical, as it comes with the realization that, yes, you did manage to get lost in the music, which in the case of Halysis‘ newest EP may have been the exact goal. Of Static Slumber’s title track does a lot of the heavy lifting in that regard but if Halysis can continue with this sort explosive musical collision they may yet find that aforementioned groove to settle into, because the unveiling of potential on offer here is far too tantalizing to pass on.