(Multiple listens and two months after the album’s release by Nuclear Blast, DGR now attempts to describe why the latest full-length by the Spanish prog-death band White Stones remains so fascinating.)

There are a few albums a year that I’ll fully own up to listening to and writing about here because they fascinate me. You can pinpoint those write-ups because I’ll often preface them with that exact statement. They’re albums where by the end of a long listening session I’m still not 100% sure where I stand on them, or they provide an indescribable difficulty in discussing why they continue to stick around.

Last year one of those albums was the Spanish death metal group White Stones‘ release Kaurahy. The Martin Mendez (of Opeth bassist fame) project’s first release was an amorphous number, one whose combination of folklore and prog-death sensibilities was hard to grasp on to. The darkened atmospheres and little light provided often felt like trying to kill a moth while it danced in and out of your flashlight’s beam, or like thinking you finally had a hold on a spiky ball and could grasp it only to have it turn completely smooth and move just outside your field of view again. It was, for lack of a better term, fascinating.

Not all of that album worked and it could at times come off a little samey and would blur together, yet an album that many were expecting to be a sort of prog-death masterpiece, given its pedigree, turning out to be an oddly discordant beast that was more often ugly groove than it was fully death was a surprising turn.

You can definitely find value in consistency though, and one year later the group behind White Stones return to us again, this time with an album entitled Dancing Into Oblivion, and save for a couple of notable changes it is once again a fascinating album. Continue reading »

(This is the fourth installment in a seven-album review orgy by our man DGR, who is attempting to free his mind for year-end season by clearing away a backlog of write-ups for albums he has enjoyed in 2020. We’ve been running these on consecutive days — except we missed Friday — and today’s subject is a debut album released last spring via Nuclear Blast by the Spanish band White Stones.)

The March 13, 2020 album Kuarahy by the band White Stones is such a fascinating release for a number of reasons. This far out from its release, it’s been interesting to see how things have played out for the group’s debut release via Nuclear Blast. On the homefront, we covered the music videos in the lead-up to the debut of this project led by Martin Mendez (of Opeth bassist fame), but upon full release it kind of full off the site’s radar. We’ll rectify that here.

This is a record I’ve listened to a multitude of times since its release, and by the end of multiple listening sections and a seven-month writing delay it remains stubbornly ‘interesting’, in part because what keeps grabbing me seems to nebulous. Every time I think I have a hold on it, it wriggles away and moves just slightly out of vision again. It’s a bizarre creature that seems to exist permanently ‘elsewhere’, even though  at first glance it never seems to garner much more than ‘that’s some prog-death music alright’. Continue reading »