Review Summary: I see your Scale the Summit and raise you one Pomegranate Tiger...
Discovering a new, young, talented band the likes of Pomegranate Tiger has an annoying tendency to inject a false sense of paternal (or maternal of course) warmth into one’s soul. Much in the same way football fans intimately identify with their favorite teams to the point where they use words like “us” and “we” when talking about them, discovering and subsequently sharing fresh, young talents while watching their popularity rise can give you the feeling of pride or accomplishment. This feeling is of course, for the most part, a silly fever dream as a band’s success is primarily contingent on their sound, talent level and work ethic (in a perfect world). With
Entities, Pomegranate Tiger display all three of these attributes in spades and while it may be too early at this juncture to claim them the greatest new band of the year, it would not be a stretch to put
Entities up with anything bands like Scale the Summit or Animals As Leaders have put out.
Writing solid progressive music that is accessible is a difficult undertaking. Bands tend to stick to one idea in a song and ride it till the end which can easily bore the listener if that idea is lackluster.
Entities never gets lost in its own groove, constantly shifting and changing song structures throughout the album which serves to attract and keep the listeners attention firmly in each note of the songs. The music itself is not unlike Scale the Summit but hits you with much more immediacy and impact while still retaining the beautiful progressive passages you can lose yourself in. It’s easy to tell the meticulousness in which Pomegranate Tiger crafted these songs and how every instrument plays its part in creating a little world in each. Both in the melodic and technical sense the album is executed wonderfully with little that can be called fluff and nothing that can be called unnecessary.
What
Entities does best is create a mood. Each song is its own self-contained little world which may sound like a lack of continuity as a whole but this surprisingly is not the case. Every acoustic bit, every slowing burning interlude, and every piano passage while utilized sparsely, mesh beautifully with each song they reside in. This is not to say the album is akin to fairies sprinkling dust over small animals and clouds lazily floating under a magenta sky nay, this is a metal album through and through and while there is much beauty to be heard here, there is just as much face-melting to go along with it. Elements of death metal and thrash are some of the many influences incorporated in
Entities. There’s no compensating for lack of skill in the mood this album creates. Not only is every guitarist blessed with a dancing white spider for a fret hand, the drummer is equally as impressive and keeps everything nice, sound, and tight.
This album is both beautiful and harrowing, mellow at one moment only to savagely wake you and show you this is a metal record. The frankly surprising way in which
Entities is able to convey such a bevy of feeling is what makes it great. The upside for Pomegranate Tiger if they manage to garner the following they deserve is limitless and this easily will be one of the best progressive metal albums this year. Fans of progressive metal would do well to give this a listen and with 12 songs coming in at around 65 minutes, there’s a lot to take in. When you do though, you’ll find yourself always strangely ready for another helping.
