PROGRESSIVE METAL

DOM LAWSON buckles up for a delve into the darker, heavier side.

There is epic and then there is Varaha. Ostensibly operating in the post-metal world, this Chicagoan quartet have constructed a debut album of audacious scale and scope. Blending wildly evocative postmetal sprawls with extensive orchestral pieces across 75 immersive minutes, A Passage For Lost Years (Prosthetic) demands total surrender and, given how jaw-dropping the likes of My World And Yours and the title track are, will almost certainly get it. Progressive heaviness just found its new heroes.

Best known as the bassist with Napalm Death, Shane Embury has had countless side-projects over the years, but none have strayed as far into prog territory as TRONOS. Debut album Celestial Mechanics (Century Media) offers a versatile, noisily psychedelic take on slow-motion doom metal and shimmering post-shoegaze art rock, with flashes of polyrhythmic perversity and surging space rock adding to an irresistible sense of conceptual madness and controlled chaos. Originally self-released in 2013, Slaldic Curse’s third album Devourer (Apocalyptic Witchcraft) fully deserves a more fulsome re-release. Admittedly, this is progressive extreme metal and therefore unlikely to delight many Mostly Autumn fans, but if your taste extends to thrash or black metal, the British crew’s fiery virtuosity and unerring ingenuity should scratch an exploratory itch. The eight-minute Abduction Void is particularly mind-blowing. Similarly, you may need to embrace the notion of screamed vocals to truly enjoy German mavericks Temple Koludra’s extraordinary Seven! Sirens! To A Lost Archetype (Transcending Obscurity) but it’s a leap of faith worth making. Inspired by the hazy depths of Indian spirituality, labyrinthine epics such as Namarupa and White I Trance combine black metal’s ornate savagery and instinctive magniloquence with ethereal atmospherics and traditional instrumentation.

There are few things more proggy in the history of heavy music than the six insanely bombastic sci-fi concept albums made by symphonic black metallers Bal-Sagoth between 1995 and 2006. Off the radar for the past decade, most of the band’s final line-up have reconvened as Kull and their debut album Exile (Black Lion) is exactly what Bal-Sagoth fans have been craving. Still the sonic embodiment of an epic intergalactic battle, songs such as Hordes Ride and Aeolian Supremacy may lack former frontman Byron Roberts’ literary intricacies, but brothers Chris and Jonny Maudling have lost none of their compositional prowess and this is an undeniably barnstorming return from some true originals.

Finally, Swiss folk metallers Eluveitie have surpassed themselves on the boldly conceptual Ategnatos (Nuclear Blast). It’s an album full of expansive, cinematic and strongly melodic metal anthems, all woven together to effect the ebb and flow of a compelling story arc, liberally sprinkled with progressive tropes and then parked on the side of a mountain to achieve maximum, windswept melodrama.