Sage of Shekhinah

Of all the revivalist genres to have plagued the metal landscape over the last decade, the return of early 1990s progressive death metal is one I can definitely get on board with. Given the nose dive to homogeneity that tech death took during the 2000s, this welcome course correction was required. Lost in endless tomes of dense, directionless musical esoterica devoid of soul and spontaneity, it became a closed border for the general populace, a feedback loop of musical esoterica aimed only at fellow musicians. Resurrecting some of the colour, life, dynamics, and organicism of earlier iterations of the genre has therefore been a welcome means to allow the listener to once again cross the border and engage in this music as a form of artistry as well as craft.

Contrarian slide nicely into this modernist tradition, offering complex sci-fi themed progressive death metal as playful as it is masterfully executed. ‘Sage of Shekhinah’ is their fifth such endeavour, it is notable for drawing on not just the techniques of Cynic, Atheist, and Watchtower et al., but also for nailing a sense of creative cohesion, and even leaving room for something as banal as “fun”. Ultimately this is music that has an audience in mind, real care has been taken to craft these compositions with strongly defined narrative arcs. For all their surplus activity, warping time signatures and dexterous chord progressions, a non-musical listener can still fully engage with, and orientate themselves, into the journey this music is attempting to take us on.

They pivot on a degree of rhythmic bounce, playful in its sense of humour, but never trivialising the overall experience. Crisp distorted guitars flesh out the mix with sharp clarity, but again, the object is not clutter or intensity despite the undeniably technical nature of the music. Plenty of space is left for the bass to cut through with engaging hooks and wonderful melodic vignettes, along with plenty of clean interludes where the music adopts a more jazz orientated style a-la Atheist. Vocals adopt the higher end of the death metal spectrum, working through harsh rasps of aggression that retain enough rhythmic clarity to navigate this three dimensional interplay.

Tonally, the overarching emotive effect of ‘Sage of Shekhinah’ is one of threnody. There are many tangents and routes hinted at but not fully taken. But the melodic core of the central leads are decidedly mournful, tragic almost. They speak of loss, aging, a mature acceptance in the face of the passage of time. But this overarching thread is given greater clarity and gravitas due to the excessive amount of external commentary, the many left turns the music takes, and the plethora of additional material provided by each instrument as it deviates from the central narrative to provide moments of antagonism, only to be folded back into the main narrative.

The quality of song writing on display here means we can almost dispense with any mention of the retro aspects of this album. Yes, it references elements of early progressive death metal and thrash, but this is almost incidental to the fact that Contrarian have succeeded in articulating a character and story of their own, one that stands apart without the need for us to over emphasise style and influence. A singular and strangely hypnotic success story for progressive metal.

Originally published at Hate Meditations