PERIHELLIUM

Perihellium was founded in 2004 as a Progressive Metal outfit originally consisting of founder Gerard Wrobel (guitar, keyboard). The band's second full length album "Prototype" was released in November of 2019 consisting of Wrobel also supplying vocals along with his guitar and synth work with Piotr Tokarz (bass) and Seweryn Blasiak (drums). The album consists of 7 powerhouse tracks with a combined time of 43 minutes. The entire album follows a sci-fi concept story, all composed by Wrobel. The story is available to read on a track by track basis on the Bandcamp album download. The story involves 3 main individuals who have become immortal.

The band plays some very nice and solid melodic metal with some progressive aspects. Both the keyboard and guitar work is top notch, sometimes sounding close to symphonic as the synths take on the orchestral style which supports the heavy and dramatic music quite well. Wrobel's vocals are also quite good, his voice flows from clean to dirty vocals naturally, and in both cases, the sound is impressive, but there is some evidence of electronical enhancement in the vocals from time to time, but it's not overbearing.

Most of the time, it's the heaviness that rules in the sound, but the synths do a great job of enhancing the music. Wrobel proves his compositional skills in the opening instrumental "Prelude to the Storm" which is nicely symphonic and sweeping, and it does its job in psyching the listener up for the progressive metal power of the subsequent tracks. Except for the 3 minute opener, the tracks all span between 6 - 9 minutes, and everything here is developed quite well. After the strong one- two punch of "Termination" (which has some melodious growling) and "Enemy: Unknown", the next track "Rain" offers a softer and slower side which develops into a powerful track with an excellent keyboard solo where the tempo picks up and becomes more intense, and then the solo gets taken over by the guitar, and this all makes for a definite highlight on the album.

The longest track on the album follows with "Prototype: Day One" at over 9 minutes. This track is much more progressive and begins with harsh and growling vocals, which, as in the 2nd track, the music flows easily from dirty to melodic clean vocals. Towards the middle of the track, things calm down quite a bit as a spoken narration comes in and eventually works back up to heaviness and accumulating into great progressive guitar solo. This track is another definite highlight, and seems to be the main centerpiece of the album. Again, there is a great balance of keyboards in there as they later take the spotlight while heavy guitars support. As the instrumental section continues, the music moves into an atmospheric, dark and experimental section before resolving into a slow and melodic section led by another lovely and slow guitar solo and then the track ends sounding dark and mysterious.

The solid progressive metal power continues on the last two tracks, both of which exceed 6 minutes. "Cyborgization" is about the evolvement of humans into cyborgs that can live forever, but who have exchanged their humanity and emotions along with any memory of it for eternal existence. The music continues to be driving, progressive and powerful. "Storm and Lights" is an instrumental that continues with the dramatic and heavy sound with continued great balance between the guitars and keys.

This is a pretty good album that has a good amount of progressive elements and a good balance of heavy guitar and also synths which give it some nice symphonic edges. The music is mostly accessible in metal terms, but still remains progressive throughout. The best track is "Prototype: Day One" which definitely takes the album close to 5 star territory, but the rest of the album pretty much remains somewhere between good and excellent. I give this a 3.5 rating, but because of the epic 5th track and some greatness in various other parts of the album, it rounds up to 4 stars.

At the beginning of 2004, Gerard Wróbel (guitars, songwriting) formed Perihellium and the band quickly found success in their native Poland by winning various competitions. This brought them to the attention of Insanity Records who signed them and released their debut 'The New Beginning' in March 2008. From looking at their website the band have been busy, playing gigs and winning more competitions, but what about the CD itself? Well, what we have here is another superb example of prog metal by a band confident in their abilities to provide melodic counterpoint both aggressively and passively as the need dictates. I note that on the CD vocalist Marcin Sułek is designated as a guest (although looking at the website, thankfully available in two languages, it appears that he is now a full member), which may explain why the band seems often to concentrate on long musical passages as opposed to many with vocals. Marcin sings without accent and actually this is a very Western sounding album, and even though there is one longer song (eighteen minutes plus) this is an album that is very immediate and impressive.

To be honest, I knew within the 30 first seconds that I was going to enjoy this album as opener "Chrome" kicks off with some Tan Dream style noodlings which gradually intensifies before the whole band comes crashing through. It is intense, dramatic, and definitely great fun! This band may be becoming fairly well known in Poland but music of this quality demands to be heard far more widely.

originally written in 2009