Review Summary: Another solid instrumental outing from Mendel, free of pretentiousness or overstuffed ideas.
As far as progressive metal goes, it’s commonplace to find bands stuffing their albums with as many complicated ideas and overblown concepts as possible. Recent years have seen music listeners and critics clamoring anywhere they can for the next masterpiece, while bands try to live up to their expectations as best they can, as well as try to recapture and relive their heyday. These mostly result in overlong albums rampant with worthwhile, interesting material alongside a lot of filler. Instrumental groups have seemed to largely resist this trend with the likes of Animals As Leaders, Blotted Science, and Mendel freeing themselves from conventional song structures and vocals to focus purely on unshackled, overblown guitar wanking and grandiose songwriting and song structures. Mendel fills his 70-minute LPs with florid instrumental goodness, delivering what he knows these fans want without the distractions.
Mendel bij de Leij is the award winning, full-time guitarist for Aborted and System Divide. Plenty of high-octane riffing and shredding is displayed in his main bands, but he completely changes his style for his solo name Mendel into full-blown progressive metal. His latest,
Oblivion, largely follows in the same vein as its predecessor
Subliminal Colors, though this time with more nods to contemporaries. Opener “Discover” features spacey keyboard lines similar to what can be found in recent releases by Dream Theater. The ending solo of “Visions” sounds eerily similar to some of Periphery’s best moments, and “Discover” contains some of the most technical guitar work of the album, turning off the distortion for some Animals As Leaders-esque guitar arpeggiating. Whether intentional or not, these nods to influences are played with just as much skill and grace as the aforementioned leaders of the scene.
Despite the familiar touches, most of
Oblivion is comprised of pounding drumming, nonstop riffing and soloing, and a few quiet parts to break up the pummeling intensity. The most poignant and developed examples being in the latter half of “Oblivion Pt. 1,” culminating in a building acoustic guitar line that perfectly transitions into “Pt. 2, ”
Oblivion’s climax. These provide thankful breaks from breakneck speed riffing, and improves on the impressive, but at times monotonous
Subliminal Colors. Ultimately, Mendel isn’t doing anything new or groundbreaking. What he is doing is providing a straightforward and impressive display of enjoyable, bombastic instrumental rock. Those tired of the operatic wailing or unnecessary forays into genre bending in their favorite bands should get their progressive metal fix within the fun, self-aware, and extravagant
Oblivion.
