Review Summary: Not Progenie Terrestre Pura's masterwork, but a surprisingly involving and intriguing piece of sci-fi black metal nonetheless.
Despite not being overly impressed by Progenie Terrestre Pura’s brand of Italian sci-fi black metal before, the summary attached to the promo download of their new concept EP
starCross sucked me in. Lines like “In the beyond-Moon journeys era, in a sector not mapped yet, the scouting ship A.S. Mori follows an unknown signal coming from a distant moon” and “Embrace fear, madness and despair in the darkest Progenie Terrestre Pura release to date” gave me some entirely unfair H.P. Lovecraft vibes with a bigger science fiction slant, and considering my on-again, off-again obsession with the legendary figure I had to give it a listen. While
starCross isn’t an album to cement qTp (as they abbreviate themselves) as the breakout black metallers of 2018, it does succeed as something altogether surprising to me.
Initially,
starCross seems more conventional than it is. It’s bookended by a couple of atmospheric tone-setters while the three body tracks bring assaults of harsh shrieks, relentless riffs, and spacey synths. It’s also difficult to connect it to its concept storyline (written by band member Davide Colladon) of a space odyssey into the unknown, despite being the first release from qTp in English instead of Italian. Without lyrics in front of me it’s nigh impossible to really track anything aside from a few words that crop up in some spoken word sections (notably in “Twisted Sillouette”) since everything’s told via waves of distorted guitars and abrasive snarls. It’s easy to chalk up most of the material as straightforward synthy black metal, which isn’t far from the truth, but there’s something here that begins to unveil itself on repeated listens.
There’s something in the atmosphere of
starCross that makes it intriguing. There’s an alien essence to the instrumentation when it collides with the mix, a very particular melding that I think would be extremely difficult to reproduce. The synths are sterile by intention, bubbly sci-fi conventions that arc over the more earthly inventions underneath. The drums notably come across as mechanical, a little reminiscent of industrial beats, while the guitar riffs are sometimes constructed in jagged, obtuse ways. It all comes together in a way that really strikes me as very unorthodox, but it contrasts with sections that are the opposite, very conventionally staged parts to the point that they seem predictable. Without having actually read the concept story I could be overreaching, but I like to think it’s all intentional, very straightforward and human black metal passages made to bounce off the more unnatural, alien sections to connect to a story of man investigating the unknown. Perhaps it wasn’t the intention, but that was the effect it had on me and
starCross is all the better for it. It isn’t an album of great individual songs so much as an album with a particular atmosphere. Whether or not a story was consciously crafted into the music rather than just the lyrics (the pitfall of many a concept record), something was born here and perhaps not something so seemingly human.
