vote
7.0
- Bands:
STELLAR CIRCUITS - Duration: 00:42:12
- Available from: 11/14/2025
- Label:
-
Nuclear Blast
Streaming not yet available
Stellar Circuits, a quartet from Salem considered by critics to be among the progressive metal groups, come out with their third work entitled “Phantom :: Phoenix”; without trying to harness too much into mere definitions that mix of genres that determine the sound of this formation, it must however be said that we are faced not with classic progressive but with a series of contaminations that range from Deftones to A Perfect Circle up to metalcore.
Like the cover of this album, their music certainly lives in binomials and dichotomies: we can notice a soul broken in half which manifests itself well with Ben Beddick's two vocal typologies, the screamed one and the velvety one. This dualism, even in the structure of the songs, creates complex scores that when listened to sound like a middle ground between the metalcore passages of Caliban in “The Awakening” and Landmvrks in “Lost In The Waves”, with math-rock instrumental parts played by Jared Stamey's guitar and sounds closer to Vola in “Witness” and The Contortionist in “Clairvoyant”.
For the crescendo of rhythms and atmospheres, credit must be given to drummer Tyler Menon and an honorable mention to bassist Jesse Olsen (his presence on the album is notable, from the introduction of “Same Page” to the cadenza in “The War Within”).
You find yourself disconcerted when you go from more direct and catchy songs like “Gloria”, with its immediately catchy chorus and electronic sounds, to others that wait like unexpected slaps: proof of this is “I See Your Spirit”, which makes the start of the album a wall of sound of shouted parts and then of slowdowns and lagoons that lead again to violent pounding vortices. Precisely because of these continuous jolts we can appreciate the most reflective, most enchanting parts and notice the good work done in constructing these pieces that make up the album; regret in part for the lack of homogeneity of influences, because in the final result the metalcore part does not always fit correctly into the melodic lines.
This “Phantom :: Phoenix” is not a record for lovers of the commonly known progressive genre, but for those who turn their listening to new frontiers, to dialogues between more extreme worlds and dried sounds of pompous trappings, where the rhythmic part is predominant and the impact of the various songs becomes almost physical.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
