vote
7.5
- Band:
SIDEREAN - Duration: 00:43:45
- Available from: 09/13/2024
- Label:
-
Edged Circle Productions
Streaming not yet available
With the new “Spilling the Astral Chalice”, Siderean confirm themselves as tireless experimenters of oblique sounds. An album whose listening creates an aura of great imaginative and particularly immersive suggestion, often giving the sensation of a sort of visionary, alienating and pulsating psychedelia, where the guitars distort, moan, shout and overflow on the interventions of a decidedly refined rhythmic section.
The successor to “Lost on Void's Horizon” is a real environmental immersion divided into six impressions, six episodes that rework techno-thrash and progressive death metal elements and channel them towards an ideal contemplative zone with a changing morphology, with pieces like “Emerald Age” where the plot becomes more dreamlike than ever, almost making us enter a hypnotic state.
In each track of this second full-length, the Slovenian group tries to perform the magic of dispersing every point of reference with the ambition of setting up an original and personal discourse, where the mixture and collision of heterogeneous elements and the play of dissonances tries to translate into crystalline lightness and impalpable fading.
Starting from metal models, one could cite the usual Gorguts, Stargazer, Extol or Execration – even certain Opeth in some syncopated passages – but on this occasion the visionary component is so accentuated and the arias are so sibylline and elusive that the whole thing almost ends up sounding like Ved Buens Ende supported by death metal rhythms. The band tries to propose a hermeneutics of harmony, a thin thread of union with which to elevate an edgy and avant-garde riffing towards arias of absolute abstraction.
The result is an extremely dense album, in a mix that is at times chaotic and at times soporific in its levity, in which sidereal atmospheres and earthly interferences alternate, the latter guided by a particularly spontaneous vocal interpretation, in which the growling often gives way to different shades of shouted voices. A tracklist in which a series of questions are raised and left to flow, available to a fringe of listeners who are particularly attentive and inclined to listening with headphones.
Once again, there are few holds, easy-to-grasp ideas or hints at a vague concept of a song, but a piece like “Visions” remains exemplary in its display of the dreamy soul of the Slovenians and the heart of the whole work, which is given first and foremost by the great suspensions on which the harmonies are built, resting on apparently fragile constructions but gripped by a notable emotional force.
Those who appreciated “Lost…” will therefore find Siderean increasingly convinced about the path to take, more committed than ever to their mental and astral journey without known boundaries. Those looking for greater nastiness, warmth or progressions capable of maintaining simpler structural and harmonic balances, will necessarily have to look elsewhere.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM