Review Summary: Almost reaches the sun itself
Anciients is a progressive metal band from Vancouver, British Columbia, a city known for producing its share of musical hybrids. What makes Anciients stand out isn’t just their technical skill but their sense of musical conversation. Brock MacInnes and Kenny Cook trade lead guitar like two old friends finishing each other’s sentences. Drummer Mike Hannay strikes a rare balance between technicality and passion, and bassist Rory O’Brien, formerly of the criminally underrated Yukon Territory-based prog group Bushwhacker, manages to always find his voice in the mix.
What’s most refreshing with Beyond the Reach of the Sun is its lack of elitism. These musicians are listeners first and foremost, students of metal who can appreciate Opeth one day, Rush the next, Blue Oyster Cult the day after, and still find joy in Mastodon or Gorguts. The first half of the album proudly wears these influences, as opening track “Forbidden Sanctuary” and “It Is Your God” display everything they do best: galactic atmosphere, dynamic shifts, and a willingness to let the music breathe rather than bludgeon.
But this soon becomes a pattern. Nearly every track opens with a minute of clean, chambery guitar that builds up the atmosphere before diving into the meat of the song, a tapestry of metal styles that mesh rather well. Although it’s quite admirable how much variety this band can naturally squeeze into one song without sounding disjointed, it becomes boring when five songs in a row more or less sound the exact same, weave through riffs at the exact same speed, atmosphere, and drive. After a few tracks, you begin to wonder if this band are capable of writing something more grounded, more groovy.
Fortunately, the band delivers exactly that in the album’s backhalf. Here, Anciients trade sprawling epics that traverse across the universe for something that punches holes in planets. The riffs hit harder, the hooks bite deeper. “Celestial Tyrant” drops you straight into a groove that feels like Baroness and Atheist coalesced. “Beyond Our Minds” abandons mood-building and rockets into the album’s strongest riffage, while “The Torch” sounds like Opeth channeling classic Black Sabbath, with riffs that are thick, grimy, and just as astral as the rest of the album. The album wisely wraps up with an excellent instrumental, followed by “In the Absence of Wisdom,” a final epic that captures the first half’s grandeur best off all.
Anciients haven’t made a perfect album, but they’ve made an honest one, an album that listens as much as it speaks. In a genre often obsessed with its own cleverness, sincerity counts for a lot. Many prog metal seem more fixated on making their songs are complicated and technical as possible, even at the detriment of the music itself. Anciients are trying to move out of that stereotype. They may still be reaching toward something greater, but there’s beauty in the reach.
