Friday, May 19, 2017

DLP Review: "Erosion" by Cydemind

Erosion
There are times when your buddy here feels like Abraham Simpson yelling at the world and demanding that the United States removes three states.

He also says he'll be dead in the cold, cold ground before he recognizes Missour-AH, but as we're in Missouri, it's probably something different right?

My personal windmill is the hyper factioning of all the metal sub-genres. Certainly there are different kinds of metal and a factioning isn't necessarily a bad thing.

It's the overuse of these ideas that gets on my nerves. In the now (seemingly) distant past, friends spoke of this new thing called Folk Metal. There was no way it would ever make it into my music library. My mind was closed at the time. What made that particular type of metal so interesting was the inclusion of new instruments into the fold.

Cydemind
Going in, our information was that Cydemind was a progressive metal band.

That's it.

As the first track opens, they showed how different of a metal band that they are. Violin strains were all over the tracks.

This sounded truly amazing. It was unlike anything out there. As the track wore on, I began to think that either this going to be one of the best albums of the year, or the vocals were going to kick in and completely ruin it.

The vocals never kicked in. At that point, I had to go back through all of the information on Cydemind and then it dawned on me, they're instrumental. Thank the gods and devils. There are only a few people who could sing over this music without ruining it.

Back to Folk Metal, there's a great number of metallers that feature folksy violins and banjos. There's over double that number of metal bands that infuse classical music on the guitar. (Thank you Randy Rhoads.)

But the idea of a band that fuses classical guitar, piano, synths, and the humble banjo into progressive metal? This is something wholly new and amazing.

In the liner notes, there is a "lyrical poem" describing the inspiration of each piece of music. This is narrative music inspired by nature.

So, in a way, it is folk metal, but not really.

Release: 5/26/17
Genre: Progressive Metal
Label: DIY
Formats: CD/Digital
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