Review Summary: Given the circumstances, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll find such a enjoyable and intellectual record from a band in your local high school.
High schoolers are some of the most bipolar folks you’ll ever meet. One second they’re able to shock you with a novel and intellectually stimulating idea only to follow up with a crude sexual joke. It’s so clear that they have potential, but it's nearly universally true that first, they need to grow up a little bit. This very dichotomy of maturity and room for growth leaves Protest the Hero’s debut album Kezia alternating between compelling and wanting. Written while the bad was still in high school, Kezia shocks the listener at times with its incredibly poetic and thematic concept, but it can’t help but get bogged down by some of the immaturity of the musical ideas surrounding it.
There are ultimately two main draws towards Protest the Hero’s music: the band’s ridiculous technical capacity and the uncannily well-written lyrics that pervade the entire record. These boys can play, and they don’t want you to forget that, which leads to the album’s biggest problem: a large focus on technical ability and a lack of musical coherency. That’s not to say the album is incoherent as far as its overall sound – every song has that unmistakable Protest sound of Between the Buried and Me style technical riff after technical riff mixed with vocalist Rody Walker’s high register voice soaring over the riffs. These riffs by themselves are enjoyable – like any prog metal riff, they’re complicated enough to take time to get buried in your skull, but once they do they will certainly be stuck there for an indefinite time. The majority of the music in Kezia functions just fine as individual bits and pieces of music, but therein lies the problem. Pick almost any song off of the album and listen to it; you’ll find that there is no coherency, no sense of a definitive beginning or end, and no sense of a progression within the songs. The songs often sound as if they just start and stop without thought, resulting in the feeling akin to reading only the middle section of a novel. When they do throw in random different parts like the piano coda at the end of “Divinity Within,” it sounds forced despite how pleasing it sounds, and it serves absolutely no purpose to the song. It’s not like the piano coda in Opeth’s “The Leper Affinity” that further punctuated the bleak atmosphere of the song and album; this one just seems thrown in.
There is one extremely important exception to this criticism: “Turn Soonest to the Sea” is the one song on the album that displays a very natural progression throughout its entire duration. From its opening riffs to a spoken word bit to what’s possibly the album’s catchiest anthem in the ending, each part flows well into the next, and even when there are sudden shifts in dynamics it doesn't feel as if they did it without reason. Easily the highlight of the album, this song has clearly identifiable parts that still come together to form one coherent piece, something the rest of the songs on the album is unable to maintain. Its lyrics also highlight some of the major themes of this album, particularly regarding the band’s outspoken views on sexism in contemporary society. Walker belts out phrases such as “monument of dicks and ribs” without coming across as an immature excuse to say “dick” in a song, but rather as a credible metaphor for sexism.
In fact, the one thing that does keep the album coherent is its excellent lyrical concept. Broken up into three sections with three songs each (plus an epilogue), the album tells the story of the titular Kezia, a woman waiting to be executing for an unknown crime. The tale is told from the perspectives of the prison priest, the prison guard responsible for the execution, and finally from Kezia herself. Arif Mirabdolbaghi’s lyrics are laced with imagery and biblical allusions, adding to the already poetic nature of an album written when they were around seventeen years old. As Kezia awaits her death, the band applies the wandering thoughts of the three characters to criticize contemporary issues such as religion, sexism, and the importance of the individual determining their own beliefs. The lyrics aren’t bogged down by having to keep up with a plot in the way other concept albums are (the actual plot here is extremely minimal), but rather only convey the thoughts of the characters and, by extent, the band.
The vocal performance is going to be hit-or-miss depending on your tastes. Rody Walker often sounds like he could have just come out of any high school punk band with his high pitched shouts, but it’s difficult to deny that he’s got energy in his pipes. Walker lays down some very exceptionally catchy and anthemic vocal lines, especially in “Blindfolds Aside,” “Heretics and Killers,” and the ending of “Turn Soonest to the Sea." Less impressive are the harsh vocals. They are infrequent, but they sound grating and are incoherent as far as annunciation goes (it’s best to have the lyrics out with you for this record). Their attempts at hardcore screams and lowly death growls always feel forced and, similar to the piano coda mentioned earlier, really serve nothing to the record outside of pleasing those who need some harsh vocals in their metal. Regardless of your feelings about the vocals, at least they sound good sonically – the production on the album is very clean, with the two guitarists always being easy to distinguish and the drums carrying just the right amount of energy. It’s a shame that the bass is next to inaudible, however. We can only assume that Arif wrote basslines as impressive as his lyrics.
Kezia is a difficult work to judge critically. The music lacks coherency, but contains enough energy and hooks to make it immensely fun to listen to, and the story is shockingly mature for a bunch of teenagers to be singing about. It’s incredibly obvious at this point in their career that there’s potential for this band to write something extremely special and mature as they grow up themselves. Given the circumstances, however, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll find such a enjoyable and intellectual record from a band in your local high school.
