Review Summary: Prog metal at its finest.
In the beginning it was Progressive Rock. In 1969
King Crimson’s In the court of the crimson king changed the way we felt rock music. Since then every 10 years or so a new vague of neo-prog arrives. And when metal came Inevitably it was affected too. And so Prog metal was born. But for some reasons the prog influence on metal wasn’t quite like the one we had seen in rock music. Prog metal took soon a direction of overly complicated riffs, shifting of time signatures, fast and fastest guitars solos, and overall a great amount of technique showoff. This kind of prog metal well exemplified by
Dream Theater last till this day as in (jus for naming one) the last album by
Caligula's Horse. This is the type of sound one normally think of when a bans is labeled as prog metal.
It isn’t the only way prog metal was done but the predominant one. Some examples of album that try a real blend between the sonorities of metal music whit a more large perspective of the progressive rock ideology. The best historical example of that is perhaps
Opeth’s Watershed.
That is what I really enjoyed about Dreadnought’s A Wake in Sacred Waves. It’s an album that take his time with four tracks ten to seventeen minutes long in which those four very talented musicians explore a wide palette of sonorities. They’re not scared of slow it down to get into more introspective moments. The two female singers alternates clean and harsh vocals one beautifulest than the other, the sound is enriched by flutes saxophones, piano and it all blends in perfectly whit the heavy sound we love about metal.
A Wake in Sacred Waves is a complex, diverse but very coherent album. A magnificent listen and a very pleasant discovery.
