Phobos Monolith

Music is an oddly subjective, irrational thing- half of its' appeal, I guess. I enjoy Darkspace heaps, and partly the reason is because it's just so incredibly bombastic, but here.. well. It's a tiring listen, even though I can't really say why. When you have a Summoning/Darkspace fan telling you that the music is just a bit too over the top, i think that means something.

Not that Mare Cognitum really sound like either of those two bands. Perhaps a bit is borrowed from Darkspace, but MC is clearly a much less dark beast- Nounemon is quite a polite and melodic song, really, and even within the furiously blasting churn of the first track there's plenty of melody, some of which is borrowed off some of the more polite forest-y black metal bands. To say nothing of the fairly cheerful, often quite new agey lyrics.

But yeah, it's hard to articulate why I find this album quite a drag. It's produced well- if they're programmed drums he's put a lot of time into them, no doubt- the guitars clear and crunchy, the vocals hovering perfectly, never too shiny or over produced, and you can tell that the man behind it spent a lot of time working on it. The riffing style is perhaps the problem- it's very cascadian-ish, all these post hardcore kinda chords being used. I'm not automatically opposed to the stuff from that scene but the constant sad, yearning chords do tend to wear on you after a while. "Stately" is perhaps another word to describe it.

Perhaps a good album that I can contrast it too (despite the wildly diverging subject matter) would be Panopticon's Kentucky. There's a few similar enough traits- tendency towards long form, epic tunes with plenty of different ideas thrown in, some similar things in the riffing style, etc. One easily identifable reason why Kentucky gets me going so much more than this is that Mr.Panopticon is obviously super into it, screaming his box off, shredding up a storm- and perhaps that Mr.P is not afraid to occasionally just rock super hard. I'm not going to say that MC isn't super into it- this isn't the sort of record that one would do if you were half arsed, but the passion isn't as palpable, and few moments get me banging my fist. It's all long form atmoblack, which is absolutely fine- but the best bands in this genre can mix the arty with the visceral. I'm not so convinced that Mare Cognitum do that. There's a fair few chunkier riffs in the closing track, but they fail to bring the fire.

As mentioned earlier, it is perhaps a bit too bombastic. By and large everything is really loud all the time, and it does grate a bit. The quieter moments are just as loud, due to perhaps a slightly over enthusiastic compressing job. It's one of those things that doesn't necessarily bother me with every band I ever hear, but perhaps like Wintersun (to really pull out a band that sounds nothing like MC), having everything super super loud and layered doesn't really compensate for material that is often relatively uninteresting. You do get the feeling that the occasional lead, synth line and whatnot could get removed with little drop in quality.

I don't really want to diss this album too hard. It's just a bit nothing-ish. Not quite vicious enough, or dark enough, doesn't really emotionally resonate, doesn't rock out hard enough. Not terrible by any means, and it's almost worth getting just for the sweet cover art. Otherwise, fans of the genre only.