POSEIDON
Ambitious Brits embark on an elemental adventure
Calling your debut album Prologue is a clear sign that you intend to be around for the long haul. Starting your first track with a bristling, three-minute guitar drone suggests the notion that delayed gratification is good for the soul hasn’t been lost on this London-based four-piece. Heavy, hypnotic, in parts feverishly psychedelic and willing to take in atmospheric detours as if pulling back for a stunning establishing shot, Prologue offers the first, febrile shoots of an ongoing multi-stranded narrative – a dystopian, sci-fi opera that takes in underwater cities, class war, evangelical sects and death cults, and interstellar exploration too. The music is equally textured, the four lengthy tracks always seeking out new sonic terrain that expand the mind as much as its encrusted doom grooves grip you around the gut.
“I love those old 70s sci-fi films where it’s not about people fighting, it’s about people exploring,” says frontman and story author
Matthew Bunkell. I find genuine ideas way more exciting. This story is like the anti-Star Wars – it’s not about toppling the bad guy, it’s about how different factions relate, and its about understanding what the flaws are in my political beliefs as well.”
“The narrative has made us work a harder to make it that much more poignant,” adds drummer Raza Khan. “It’s made us better musicians as well, especially with the textures of the songs. Rather than making six-minute stock doom songs, each song is made up of lots of different parts. There’s a lot of light and shade, where we will calm it right down and build it up to something totally epic.”
For an album so conceptual, and whose closing track, Omega, lasts for a transformative 16 minutes, Prologue never sounds indulgent, the closings mantric riffs translating live as headspinning sonic alchemy.
“When we play Omega,” says Raza, “we’re locked in, we’re not looking at each other, and we’re just playing and it feels good to do that. We’re just lost in it.”