TRIO SUBLIMINAL

— First review of this album —

Going to Orenda Recordings' Bandcamp page for Trio Subliminal's second album and pressing play on the first song it recommends, "Obelisk", you may think you've begun listening to a rather conventional doom metal album: a heavy low-register guitar and drum march in B minor consisting of some basic chords... although the fact that it's released by a jazz label is a mite strange. A minute and a half in, a harmonized echoey trumpet appears and starts to play drawn out notes over the guitar chords; unusual but still that out of the ordinary. After the third minute of this 10-minute epic however, the march gradually loses its rigidity: the guitar chords become more dissonant and noisy, the drums and the trumpet become more arrhythmic and eventually it devolves into an almost ambient soundscape of guitar squeaks, erratic snares and ominous trumpeteering. This laid-back atmosphere is not to last however, as the drums again become less infrequent and more intense and guitarist Jake Vossler soon switches to a Van Halen-like moto perpetuo soloing style, almost as if attempting to reassert the order from the beginning of the song; it is beyond recovery however, and the song simply ends on some unaccompanied reverberated drum blasts.

Trio Subliminal is not a metal band like any other: rather it is a project by Vossler, trumpeter Dan Rosenboom and drummer Tina Raymond that aims to incorporate the principles of free and avant-garde jazz within the context and general aesthetic of a metal group. All songs on this album (three in total, with "Obelisk" being only half as long as the other two) were fully improvised and recorded in a single take. The album opener "Spectral Riders", the most free-form of all the songs, sounds like it's searching for a melodic foundation and in the end can only manage to establish a rhythmic beat, but a thoroughly captivating and varied recording it is nonetheless. The closer, "Kaiju", is the most structured and perhaps the most accomplished track, building itself up from more freely improvised drumming towards an actual riff, and the transitions from order to chaos and back feel much more seamless here, except for one section in the middle where the band falls completely silent and only Rosenboom is left wailing into the void before Vossler abruptly interrupts the emptiness with another distorted chord.

But even these mammoths can't sustain themselves under the pressure from the musicians' free spirits and improvisation instincts and ultimately collapse into a noisy mess of feedback, effects and percussion. Cinema Infernale is a doom metal album that depicts not only the armies marching to war, but also the chaos, destructiveness, anxiety and tragedy of warfare itself.