ONNO SHOMOY

As their name says, they are the only cell of musicians in Bangladesh (and maybe one of the handful scattered over the Indian subcontinent) whose music can be dubbed of being progressive or fitting in one of the many progressive rock subgenres. And I can say that their first effort - Onno Shomoy is..

Jaw-dropping!

Ok... Let's face it, I didn't get any of the lyrics, due to the massive language gap between me and the band members.

Anyway, I was expecting to find myself with another of those death metal bands from unknown countries (as it's the case with Andorra and the band Persephone) expecting to find maybe lots of traces of indian or folk bengali music. However, I didn't get disappointed with Artcell's sound, which lies between hard rock and technical metal, with no traces of the Indian music previously mentioned.

Their approach to progressive metal is quite remarkable, with as their site's biography says, influences from Dream Theater and Metallica, and I would add (why not) Pain Of Salvation to these bands.

Most of the tracks contain superb heavy guitar riffing, excellent bass lines, everything contained by the drummer's wall of sound. There are some tracks which also feature great acoustic guitar lines.

Another thing that surprised me is the vocalist, singing with clean voice and adding a lot of 'feeling' to the tracks. His voice reminds me, somehow, to Metallica's singer - James Hetfield and System Of A Down singer - Serj Tankian, but singing in Bangladesh's native language instead of english.

If there is something I would criticise them, is the large similarity between songs, making the album maybe hard to give a full listen at first, but it meant no problem to me, as their music is complex and needed my whole attention to fully compenetrate with it.

Highlights? I think that they all the tracks are equally great, but songs 'Onnoshomoy' and Rupok (ok.. basically the first four songs) are above the rest.

Onno Shomoy is a great album, very recommendable, but maybe not essential. It's a solid 3+ album, that i will round upwards due to their exotic location.