THOMAS GILES

DON’T TOUCH THE OUTSIDE sumerian Between The Buried And Me man splits a record – with himself.

Thomas Giles, AKA Tommy Rogers, is the frontman of North Carolina’s premier metallic proggers and allround smart cookies Between The Buried And Me. He’s already popped out a double album with his regular gig in the shape of this year’s Automata I & II and now has somehow found time to write and produce his fourth solo album in seven years, Don’t Touch The Outside. Acolytes of BTBAM will not automatically qualify as Giles’ solo fans. This is a place for exploration and experimentation – predominantly in the electronic sphere, allowing the synths to shine. There’s a base of underlying heavy menace, but he mostly refrains from pressing the metal pedal.

The band Ulver, however, have been a significant influence on Giles and that gothic electro prog backbone is especially clear on this record – unsurprising, we suppose, given that their frontman Kristoffer Rygg appears on Milan. The track has the mournful trip-hop quality of Rygg and co’s turn of the millennium material and the two vocalists complement each other well, but it’s a smouldering song that never truly ignites. Elsewhere, the stuttering heavy-ish prog rock of Church Friends, Incomplet and Mr Sunshine offer the closest links to his day job.

Radiate is a different matter altogether. There’s something more dangerous and compelling in its wind-whipped synth sound and it wouldn’t have been out of place on Hans

Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch’s Blade Runner 2049 soundtrack. Like that film, it is beaten and moody, but slogs relentlessly on with a flickering, closely-guarded positivity.

While we’re on soundtracks, Take Your Seats, Time Gentlemen would work backing a film noir. There’s some Crippled Black Phoenix in its warehouse drum sound, overlaid with bolshy brass and hammered piano that descends to pandemonium. Closer, Exordium is the knock-out punch. There is an unashamed sense of Avalon-era Roxy Music in its crisp clarity and soothing, calculated melody – yet another example of a wider shift back toward the shimmering production quality that made, and then ultimately saturated and strangled, 80s music – but it does it beautifully. And when the drum and gliding top line break over a sustained piano chord, hairs are duly raised. Moments like this are all the more frustrating, though, because part of Don’t Touch The Outside can be thought of as a decent collection of moody prog rock; while the other part is a touching yet dark exercise in intelligent electro-pop. Instead it tries to do both at once: to alternate between what would be two good, but ultimately opposing EPs, and call it an album.

A PLACE FOR EXPLORATION AND EXPERIMENTATION.