GARGANTUAN

AMPLIFIER: Spacey, ambient alt-rock music with walls of sound and reminiscences ranging from NEU, PINK FLOYD, DEPECHE MODE, and FOO FIGHTERS, with sounds from RIVERSIDE, stoner, and hard rock. Raw, rhythmic new rock synth-prog-metal energy for an intimate, captivating, and avant-garde experimental opus.

"Gateway" features a frank attack of strobing drums, lit vocals, and psychedelic sounds, quickly overtaken by a fat synth coming out of the guitar, intrusive; a catchy lava sound with a progressive texture, mind you, not prog in the melodic sense, we agree. Alt-rock reminiscences on "ARCHIVE" and "OCEANSIZE"; the ambient finale, spatial voiceovers to calm this opening deluge. "Invader" as its name suggests, an invasive, reverberating sound with a monolithic sound bar on a cottony, haunting vocal. The drums are heavy, oppressive, the air vibrating like a defective spotlight. The impression of being placed next to a deluge, a musical saw logging notes; latent ambient finale. "Blackhole" with the solemn organ sound of a disused church in dark wave spleen mode. Matt's drums set the place on fire with this flight on his bruised pads while Sel's guitar imitates haunting keyboards. Everything is amplified here to give this impression of synths while you only have two members, one of whom has a huge pedal board. The vocal increases the progressive approach with its monolithic whispered phrasing, just before the guitar releases a solo worthy of the electrified SIGUR ROS; a captivating, stressful, hypnotic sound. "King Kong," with two notes from the intro reminiscent of SUPERTRAMP and The WHO. The syncopated drums extend their aura over a mid-tempo saturated with diffuse, dark, and paradoxically melodic notes; distorted synth notes worthy of SIMPLE MINDS embellish this track, as it comes out of a pedalboard, stunning. A dark wave variation with the captivating contribution of Sel's vocals; the variation is made of percussive rumble and saturated guitar before the final, a frenzied crescendo; a headline track like a wall of music with a hard psychedelic variation.

"Pyramid," with its intro, saturated with apocalyptic alarm; the drums arrive on the same wavelength, the guitar being the vector to assemble these impressions. The oppressive feeling of musical threat is at its peak, it takes the vocals to relax for a moment; the tribal choirs and the half-saturated, half-electrified electric guitar build an indestructible, imposing sound pyramid on the guitar cries of imagined animals; heavy space rock. Segue into "Entity" with its frenetic, tortured rhythm, for the Dantesque interlude; drum-guitar duo in turmoil, ecstasy, ultimate sound experience. Segue into "Guilty Pleasure" which reinforces the album in concept territory. The sound is similar, it plays with our ears by the more expressive vocal; the riff is either apoplectic or thunderous. A prog rock sound, bogging down electric grunge where Sel tempers a bit the debauchery of these noise-sounds with her voice, also saturated it seems; long viscous monolithic fade. "Cross Dissolve" rests the ears with this soaring piece where the drums settle, where the haunting sound freezes; It's still hard to believe there aren't synths in it, like those on early SIMPLE MINDS, fostering a musical trance. The most striking feature is this heady, hypnotic, repetitive chorus that cuts through space, slicing it into scattered notes. "Long Road" closes this album with a myriad of ethereal, invasive, hypnotic, and soft notes, easily evoking the signature sound of OCEANSIZE. A track that reverberates with its structure, delicacy, and dreamlike crescendo, ideally shifting the healing atmosphere to additional female choirs. On Profilprog.

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