MEAT MACHINE

Hailing from Barcelona, Spain, Obsidian Kingdom have just dropped their third studio album Meat Machine, out on Season of Mist at the end of September. The Spaniards have always been a difficult band to categorize, their special blend of prog metal drawing on disparate influences such as industrial, sludge, noise rock, alternative rock, post-rock and electronic music. Their previous 2016 album, A Year With No Summer, was heavily influenced by post-rock, with lots of slow builds and repeated phrases to create gloomy cinematic atmospheres. It was a pleasant album, very melodic and with moments of brilliance, but not terribly interesting ' the excessive repetitiveness and homogeneity of songs often making the listener lose interest mid-song.

Meat Machine is a completely different beast. It's a punchier album, brimming with a multitude of ideas and musical styles and never resting too long in one place. The cinematic melancholy of the previous album is replaced with a stronger dose of anger and aggression. Most songs are heavy and fast-paced, saturated with waves of jarring guitar noise, furious drumming, and dissonant, shouted vocals. This musical heaviness is matched by the weight of the lyrics, with songs touching themes of sexual frustration, anomie, and the mercification of human relations. There are occasional concessions to melody, though, as the instrumental maelstrom quiets down and soothing melodies emerge from the wall of noise, giving the listener a much needed respite. New band member Jade Riot Cul plays a key role in this, as she provides haunting, hypnotic vocal harmonies that complement the more abrasive, Mastodonesque performance of singer/guitarist Rider G Omega.

The album is at its best when it juxtaposes melody and aggression in this way, such as on tracks like 'Naked Politics', 'Flesh World' or 'Meat Star'. These tracks provide an interesting sound, well balanced between industrial/sludge/noise rock (Mastodon; Amplifier; Swans; Cult of Luna) and gothic/occult alt-rock (The Devil's Blood; Dool). Elsewhere, Obsidian Kingdom push more on the accelerator, favouring aggression over atmosphere and mixing in even more styles and influences ('The Edge'; 'Vogue'; 'Womb of Fire'). At times, I feel there is a bit too much going on in these songs, as the ever-changing musical patterns do not give the music a chance to properly sink in and the relentless washes of noise, dissonance and aggression risk overwhelming the listener.

In fact, the biggest limit of Meat Machine is that, while it certainly provides a more interesting listening experience than A Year With No Summer, it is also a more intense album that is harder to enjoy and much more demanding on the listener. I particularly struggled with the denser second-half of the album that does not quite have the melodic quality and compositional craft of songs like 'Naked Politics'.

Obsidian Kingdom are a band that pride themselves of exploring the boundaries of rock music and defying classification. The undeniable upside of this approach is that their music never fails to provide thought-provoking explorations of new musical landscapes ' which is a quality I deeply appreciate from an artist. The downside, however, is that Obsidian Kingdom's unrestrained thirst for experimenting with new sounds and styles sometimes comes at the sacrifice of the aesthetics of their musical productions. If Obsidian Kingdom could more consistently find the right balance between boundary-pushing experimentalism and melodic accessibility, as they do in a bunch of songs of Meat Machine, they might truly become an unstoppable force in the progressive rock/metal arena.

(Originally written for The Metal Observer)