THE HABIT OF FIRE

When listening to Kekal, nothing else comes to mind except they always put lots of new things to every new album they made. The Habit of Fire is not the exception. Their sixth album delivers new ideas of what progressive metal should be: innovative.

Everyone knows that the progressive metal scene is getting stagnant nowadays, with no new and interesting things offered by the genre's most popular bands, and most of these bands just play highly-skilled instrumental-ability as a show-off factor, combined with boring songwriting and typical high-pitched vocals. But Kekal leaves lots of interesting things to be desired. They could make complex time-signature acrobats and fast technical guitar solos, but they chose to stick with the flowing songwriting, and focus on the genre cross-overs (jazz fusion, trip-hop, ambient, industrial, etc......) with a strong fixation towards electronic music.

There is a growing and demanding movement called 'avantgarde metal', to refer to metal bands that are progressive but not stagnant. Kekal may be fall under this new and hot movement, but Kekal will still be Kekal. Maybe in next couple albums they would become some sort of an electronic band rather than metal. It's a big question but I don't care, as long as they will still deliver high quality music. "The Habit of Fire" is an amazing album despite of its weirdness and eclecticism that made the band being tremendously underrated and overlooked everywhere. Essential to everyone that is looking for something fresh and unique.