Metatheosis

After eight years, Metatheosis is only the second album released by Noneuclid, a band composed of members from Obscura (Linus) and Dark Fortress (Seraph, V. Santura, Morean), as well as another vocalist (Bruce) who seems to no longer be in the band. That’s rather unfortunate, as his vocals add to the character of the band’s music, which would otherwise be Dark Fortress with fretless bass. Not that such a band would be a bad thing, mind you.

In fact, in the slow parts (i.e. songs like ‘Buried Forever’ and ‘Across the Mist of Broken Glass’) the band’s sound is quite similar to that of Dark Fortress. However, the presence of Linus and Bruce prevent Noneuclid from being a Dark Fortress cover band. The fretless bass is raised to a position of prominence, joining in with the ominous riffs, and sometimes the lead in dragging you down to the place where the Old Gods rest, waiting to be released. They, along with the drums, are at their best when they are constantly shifting like the desert sands, not aiming for one specific, monotonic riff, but dancing around it, playing with their food. Then Bruce joins in with his vocals fit for a progressive metal sound (think Voivod), and the circle is complete. Death grunts are provided on occasion by Morean, and they fit well with whatever heavy section they’re been attached to.

In other places, the band sounds like a more straight-forward prog metal or doom/death metal band, and they still present that sound well, even if it’s a little underwhelming compared to what they’re capable of doing. In a few places, the band breaks from the slow-paced or mid-paced riffage that you’d been expecting, switching to more of a death/thrash sound (i.e. ‘Paranoid Alkaloid’, ‘Cult of One’). It’s a rare treat on an album that concerns itself mainly with presenting a slow, menacing and otherworldly sound, and front-loading all the fast songs has made the album quite unbalanced. Fixing that balance would’ve strengthened this album considerably, because the sound presented here, while well done, is ultimately not that compelling as a whole. There are many excellent moments, and many more weird ones. Unfortunately, they aren’t always the same, and when Noneuclid is able to merge more of them together they will have a created an excellent ‘weird’ metal album. All the right elements are present, but the execution was off this time.