Review Summary: Perfect competency.
Credit where credit’s due:
Mirage is the most apt title for the latest effort by bedroom-prog-metal-superstar Plini. There’s plenty of action on the surface--seatbelts on please for obligatory noodling and soloing, twinkling guitars that cascade like a gentle mist, sweeping-yet-understated strings coloring the background--yet, on the artist’s eighth proper release, one can’t help but feel that all this motion is a disguise. Subtle waves of ambience cover up an absence of depth; glittering chords and gentle textures are a hollow reference to
Trilogy, or back when such things were relatively fresh; and Plini’s guitar wizardry, once a compelling focal point, has morphed into a tribute act to himself. It’s a perfectly adequate prog-metal package for those pursuing the Sithu Aye et. al. crowd--which is precisely the problem. In the wake of the somewhat-faltering
Impulse Voices, it seems as if the Australian phenom has become complacent with competency.
The aforementioned dearth of supporting elements is a clear signal that Plini has flipped the autopilot switch; there’s a whole lot of
nothing designed to sound like something, and there’s no room for an atmosphere to manifest. “The Red Fox” can only muster a piano intro and some distant ambience, both of which are quickly swallowed up by jazzy soloing that seems to be headed nowhere fast. The problem worsens by the time “Still Life” comes around, at which point the soundscape is devoid of just about everything minus Tosin Abasi’s guest spot, with a series of uplifting string compositions buried underneath aimless funky noodling. Sole emphasis is therefore placed on Plini’s performance on its own when it used to act in cooperation with additional variables. There’s no distinguishable personality to
Mirage as a result; it’s a series of unconnected guitar exhibitions sans-hooks buoyed by drowned-out ambience, which is made to sound all the more hollow in a production so polished that it’s disturbingly sterile.
After a decade of roughly the same style, Plini’s once-charismatic, highly-technical style playing is no longer engaging enough to cover up how distressingly empty tracks feel. Instead, focus is drawn to how half-hearted the build-up of “Five Days of Rain” is and how the climax awkwardly dies, decaying into some chugs that laboriously escort the tune away. A listener is practically forced to ignore all else on “Still Life” since there is no ‘all else,’ revealing a vapid guitar playground that progresses nowhere, is indiscernible from peers, and tries to manufacture a payoff by randomly getting louder as if some kind of journey has been completed--only for that finale to be laughably brief a la “Five Days of Rain.” “Aqua Vista” teases variety in the form of a heavier introduction and a heightened strings presence, only for Plini to immediately kill all momentum and slink into their usual repertoire of arbitrary, directionless strumming. Rarely does the guitarist appear to be leading a song somewhere, and if it
does manage to get anywhere, it’s without proper development or so short it might as well have been an email.
Without proper songwriting,
Mirage crumbles. It lacks the swagger of instrumental prog gangs such as Polyphia, or the structural integrity of Interval’s post-Semesky era, or the spacey, graceful aura that Plini themselves have demonstrated being capable of. It succeeds based upon whether or not their library of solos is sufficient ear candy for a passing audiophile, in which case, it’s possibly the most perfectly competent showcase of the artist’s fretboard wanderings. That kind of competence displayed several times over eventually becomes unavoidably aggravating; it’s fun times to hear some catchy Satriani-esque phrases and melodic swings and whatnot, but it’s the bare minimum in context of much greater works orchestrated by the same musician.
Mirage is a dangerously passable affair that sheer talent in a vacuum cannot turn memorable.
