Review Summary: Tanpasin is a succinct, riffy, somewhat extreme heavy metal album which, for me, was a very pleasant introduction to the middle eastern metal scene.
In an effort to diversify the nationality of obscure prog albums I review, I picked up Electroqute. I feel that there is a certain novelty to reviewing a metal band all the way in Middle Eastern Iran. It also helps that the album art is professionally illustrated and quite satisfying to look at. Additionally, from a quick skim of the album’s sound, the musical arrangements displayed a good level of craftsmanship.
With further listens I became more and more impressed with the album’s sense of detail and quality control which made me come to a conclusion along the lines of: “Wow, this must be the biggest metal band in Iran. I mean, how big can the Iranian metal scene even be?”, and to my surprise, there are actually so many more Iranian metal bands than I had anticipated. There are hundreds even. This was a surprise to me because, during the time of metal’s genesis, Iran had undergone a historic revolution in 1979 that massively empowered the theocratic rule of Islamic fundamentalism. Among other political changes, this caused widespread censorship of music that didn’t get approved by the Iranian government. This means everything to the Iranian metal scene because genres like rock/punk/metal, to their government, represented the music of secular nations, and enemies of Islam. On a brighter note, Iran’s metal scene has been growing quickly over the past 15 years because of the recent political reformist movements that advocated for loosening restrictions on music. Though from what I am aware of, bands still have to get government approval for producing albums.
After this research, I dug a little bit into some of the most successful Iranian prog metal bands, Angband being the main one, and I was very underwhelmed by what I listened to. Electroqute is way better, undoubtedly. And they deserve more recognition.
If I’m going to be honest, it is fairly difficult to define the subgenre of metal that Electroqute is. At their core, they are some sort of a prog-leaning heavy metal/thrash metal band. But in individual instances, the album presents passages with a variety of well-integrated extreme metal elements: tremolo picking like on the song “Bimari”, blast beats in “Namayeshnameh”, frequent double-bass drums, or even heavy percussive djent-esque sections which were done well on “Zaman”. Additionally, there are plenty of thrashy shouts and experienced death metal growls on most of the songs which do well to spice up the listening experience. The difficult thing about this is that most of the composition is not quite brutal enough to be considered entirely death metal, but Tanpasin still has enough extremity that makes it difficult to fit into your average heavy metal album. It feels pertinent to add that Electroqute has a very standardized, signature way of writing and structuring songs. In that in every song on the album has its own main riff, and that riff is always displayed in isolation for the first 10-30 seconds. This is when that riff will build along with lyrics to the song’s choruses, extreme passages, guitar solos or other instrumental experimentations. But that main riff will always come back around during each of the song’s closings. This is a satisfying level of uniformity and quality control.
Furthermore, during the beginning, I struggled with finding specific albums that this sounds like because Tanpasin combines such an amalgamation of different styles. However, something I learned through my time of reviewing obscure metal is that one can often discover influences of a band’s sound by the T-shirts they wear. When looking through the band’s pictures and music videos I see Slayer, Metallica, Death, and Dream Theater attire and I think “Hell yeah”. These bands are pretty fair descriptors for what the band sounds like. I also give this band extra points for the fact that the individual member’s influences reflect well in their musicianship. The drummer wears the Dream Theater shirt, which reflects that the band’s drumming is the more progressive component, always interesting, and provides solid transitions for each of the tracks. Their guitarists wear Metallica shirts which shows that the band’s riffs are always catchy and memorable. Also, that the guitar solos feel very classic-thrash metal influenced. And the fact that the bassist wears the Death t-shirt describes the extreme-metal-influenced heaviness and fluidity of the bass performance, which could be said for all of Electroqute‘s material.
After some contemplation, I feel like a comparison to The Link by Gojira fits how a lot of the riffs and heavier moments of this album sound. Adjacently, the way Tanpasin‘s album cover is illustrated with the human so integrated, “Connected”, with the tree stump reflects the theme/message of The Link well (we are inseparable from nature). On another note, the way that the thrashy-sounding riffs are emphasized with how the heavy metal / slightly power metal, vocals are arranged makes me think that this album would please fans of Helstar‘s classic 80s and 90s albums.
It is somewhat hard to choose my favorite tracks on this album because the songs are all structured and mixed fairly consistently. All have impressive guitar solos, great riffing, and choruses with Persian lyrics that I’m far from understanding. So, the process of choosing which songs are my favorite is essentially dependent on which riffs I enjoy the most. And my favorite riff on the album has to be the riff at the beginning of “Markh”, and the way that the acoustic guitar mirrors the main distorted riff at the beginning before the drop hits is very satisfying.
One of my regrets from a couple of my past reviews is that I talked up the musicians quite a bit but failed to recognize the excellence of the vocalist’s performance. So, I don’t want to discount the great performance of Nima on vocals either: they were off-putting at first because they sound strange on a metal album, but they grew a ton on me. The vocals are part of what gives Electroqute their unique sound which makes them stand out in the metal scene. I particularly enjoyed his performance on “Bimari” and “Pileh”.
As I’ve been writing this review, I’ve also been looking through their discog and found that this is their longest album by far, standing at 52 minutes. And with the level of quality that all of the songs have, this is probably their crowning achievement. However, their past two albums are also very solid. Their sophomore album Fravak is actually more proggy than this is, and both Caution and Fravak are heavier. In a way, Tanpasin fits more as a potentially commercially successful album of theirs, since it has a good bulk of solid and accessible songs. This is also their best-produced album by far, and it overall is well-crafted and wrapped in a nice album cover. I think any metal fan who is even slightly interested in what the Middle Eastern metal scene is like should check this album out.
Attribution: https://theprogressivesubway.com/2021/08/26/review-electroqute-tanpasin/?preview_id=7691&preview_nonce=34d6594cd7& preview=true&_thumbnail_id=7692
