URANTIA

Here’s a rather odd album, featuring what the band refers to as “spiritual world metal” and ranging in sound from Celtic folk to progressive metal and several points in between. Ashtar are from Brazil and have been compared to such other ‘world’ folk bands as the Gathering, Karnataka or Gjallarhorn. I would add the Ayreon spinoff Stream of Passion to that list as well. I’m not completely convinced this is really a progressive folk band, but any time you mix violin, whistles, bagpipes and whacked-out themes of mystic worlds and other-worldly people then I suppose folk music can reasonably enter into the conversation.

Ashtar began as a doom metal band, and they are often found still listed as such in various music blogs and archives. There’s very little of that sound left in their music though, which consists mostly of fairly mellow and intimate progressive metal with Celtic overtones. None of the tracks here really stands out, although both long tracks “Urantia” and “Nemesis” demonstrate that the band has developed a knack for combining metal guitar with violin and spacey synthesizers for an overall pleasant (if not particularly original) sound.

The band is named after a supposed astral being who is preparing the lead a fleet of alien starships to Earth to bring about “planetary cleansing”, and the album is named for a book of mysterious and dubious origins whose purpose is to expand cosmic consciousness and enhance spiritual perception” (whatever that means). As an aside, the Urantia Book is the spiritual tome former Kansas member Kerry Livgren was studying when he instead converted to Christianity in the late seventies. So it seems either odd or appropriate (depending on your viewpoint) that the band includes an instrumental version of the traditional Protestant hymn “Amazing Grace” in the form of a bagpipe solo on the album.

Aside from this oddity, the bulk of the album is full of decent but fairly forgettable tunes with frequent references to other-worldly and mystical, quasi-religious themes. Like I said, a lot of this sounds like a slightly less-impressive version of Stream of Passion, and virtually all the songs here call to mind some other band. “Druid Dream” could have been done by Bluehorses, for example, and “Oblivious Scars” comes off as a decent Mostly Autumn clone but without the Gilmour-like guitar work. There are also several short, instrumental transitional pieces of a minute or so each, and these are the bits that actually lead me to at least marginally accept these guys as a form of progressive folk.

Overall I’d say this album is more of a curiosity than an essential progressive work, although if you happen to run across it and are interested in anything you’ve read here, I can at least mildly recommend picking it up. Three stars for making a decent effort, but not really anything more than that.

peace