Melotronical

On those rare occasions when I don't have to wake up at the crack of dawn and head off to work, I like a big breakfast. Omelets, bacon, toast, juice, yogurt, fruit and coffee. Good stuff. One thing I've never considered, though, is combining all of those tasty individual items in a blender, pureeing it all and creating this monstrous breakfast shake. I've wondered at times what it would taste like, but I've never had the actual urge to create that beast and guzzle it down, basically because I still possess a few shreds of sanity. Melotronical, I can imagine, is essentially the musical interpretation of such a concoction, in which the separated elements are marvelous, but consumed as a whole all at once, it's a completely fucked up experience.

Factory Of Dreams' prior release, A Strange Utopia, combined gothic industrial metal with a generous amount of progressive elements to create a unique experience, but this album goes much further into progressive and metal territory, resulting in a borderline cacophonous mess. The musical abilities of multi-instrumentalist Hugo Flores are almost beyond repproach, and the melodies espoused by the keyboards and guitars are often gorgeous during those rare moments when the focus is on one individual instrument, but too often these glorious melodies are layered to such an extent that occasionally all of these sweet riffs and noodlings interfere with each others' celestial vibe. It's like consonance gone wild, resulting in a morass of majestic passages battling for supremacy, creating a clamorous din.

The most notable issue with this release is the drum programming. It's ridiculous. Like some robot modeled after Mastodon's drummer, it allows little breathing room for the rest of the instruments, pounding away with teutonic bombast while incorporating as many extensive fills and psycho double bass hammering as possible within each tune's time frame. They can also sound a bit sloppy, as if the supposed need for a couple of extra tom hits during a roll shifted the rhythm just enough to force the guitars into damage control mode, recalculating and realigning the pace of the song. They are also rather loud mixing-wise, not exactly overpowering but without any sort of subtle ebbs and flows, thus they resonate as cold and industrial.

The album's concept involves the life cycle of a cell. Ambitious for sure, complementing a running theme musically as certain riffs and melodies are repeated throughout Melotronical, and songs segue into the next in such a way that it's difficult to know when one cut begins and finishes. In fact, this could easily have been released as one enormous track, or at least one epic divided into numerous parts. There's also some tempo shifts so jarring that it feels like one song was spliced into another halfway through it.

There's also plenty of attributes to enjoy despite my issues with this beast. The quiet atmospheric passages are sublime in a "space rock" sort of way, the kind of aural landscapes that could have aided in blowing minds while watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos series. The soaring main riffs, though oft recurrent, are pretty cool and reflect the nature of the lyrics quite well when not doused in too many embellishments. Jessica, a fine singer with an almost operatic approach, does a good job overlaying the busy music, and Hugo's contributions aren't so bad either, veering between a Devin Townsend style and the bass player from Nightwish. Overwrought, but not to a farcical level.

There's a shitload of imagination and talent involved in this release, with the keyboards, bass, vocals and guitars individually being delicious in execution. Even the drum machine has its charm, in that if nothing else, forgoing simple patterns for progressive insanity deserves some respect. Yet, when all of these ingredients are blended together, it's an unusually thick and difficult shake to swallow. And it tastes kinda funny, though still qualifies as edible.