Review Summary: Some of the best progressive metal 2023 has to offer
One of the most challenging aspects of writing music is striking the delicate balance between creating your own unique sound whilst also paying tribute to your biggest influences. The best bands can achieve this balance with great results, but unfortunately most bands will just end up sounding like clones of their heroes or badly concocted mash-ups of the sounds that influenced them. Taking one look at the bands that UK outfit Sermon are compared to, it's easy to assume they'd fall into the latter camp. Sermon are a progressive metal project very clearly influenced by bands like Tool, Opeth and Porcupine Tree, and it'd be very easy for them to be yet another melancholic European prog band that wear those influences on their sleeve. However, thankfully, they are instead a great example of progressive metal in 2023 that takes a lot of influence from those bands and isn't shy to admit it, but they back that up with really strong songwriting, fantastic musicianship and loads of memorable hooks.
Sermon's first release, "Birth of the Marvellous", was a promising start for the band, but it felt very much like a debut from a band that could do more. There was plenty to enjoy on it, but there were a few too many skippable tracks for it to be a satisfying release front to back. However, here on their follow-up "Of Golden Verse", it seems like they've ironed out a lot of kinks to release a truly spellbinding release.
The album starts slow and brooding with the intro track "The Great Marsh", with some flowing keyboard melodies and vocals, before the drums build up and lead into the first main song, "Royal". These two tracks set things up nicely for the rest of the album, which flows almost seamlessly from track to track. Unlike their previous effort, "Of Golden Verse" features a lot more interlude tracks that are all shorter than the ones on "Birth of the Marvellous", but these interludes feel way more purposeful and serve as proper preludes to the main songs that follow them. Speaking of those main songs, every song on here is filled to the brim with great riffing and very strong vocal performances courtesy of the anonymous frontperson and primary songwriter behind this project, who simply goes by Him. Songs like "Royal", "The Distance" and "Wake the Silent" really allow the vocals to shine through, with performances that are melodic, soulful and dripping with emotion, especially in the aforementioned "Wake the Silent" which retains its tension extremely well throughout its length, coupled with thrashy riffing that builds to a huge climax in the choruses and outro, which is one of the drumming highlights of the album.
The drumming is another major highlight of this album, courtesy of drummer James Stewart, whose name is likely familiar to fans of Vader and Decapitated as he's been involved in both of these bands. Whilst it's an unconventional move to involve an extreme metal drummer on an otherwise melodic progressive metal album, it allows for a very unique touch as you get moments in songs like "Wake the Silent" and the outro song "Departure" where the melodic prog metal clashes with extreme metal blast beats. Whilst James Stewart did the drums on the debut Sermon album as well, it has to said he's really been allowed to unleash his chops on "Of Golden Verse", and it contributes to this album being a huge improvement over their debut.
Overall, "Of Golden Verse" is a fantastic example of what happens when you take an otherwise familiar sound and add enough tweaks to it to make it stand out from the rest of the crowd, and that's even more impressive given how overcrowded the prog metal world has become in recent years. Sermon's second album is a very well-written album with great musicianship and an almost seamless flow that shouldn't be missed by any fan of progressive metal, and it's a name that should definitely be mentioned by more people in years to come.
