KHAOOOHS & KON-FUS-ION

Pan.Thy.Monium's third and final album is excellent to say the least, and it assures the band is one of the best forces in their genre and are unable of producing something less than amazing. This album concludes a trilogy of concept albums all combined together with some kind of story about a battle between the gods. Never had the interest of searching the lyrics to those albums actually. One element that sticks with the band throughout their albums is the clock motif, every album contains several times, clocks ticking, interesting, and i wish i knew how is it connected to their overall story. This time the band is going back to producing long prog epics instead of shorter songs, the album has 4 songs but it is actually 2 epic songs, one ambient track and another one minute silence track, so what we are left here with, is about 27 minutes of the band actual style of music, which today hardly qualifies as an EP. The band's style continues in the same line of the previous two albums, extreme death metal with avant tendencies and of course some jazz.. The sound on this album is a beast, it has a bigger impressive sound than before, everything is huge from the drums sound, guitars and the bass too.

What i like best about this group is the fact that they are so progressive!! Nothing is conventional, the music is moving forward and evolving from one minute to the next each time to a different direction, no way of knowing what's on their mind next. The quality of the music is very high, the writing is exceptional and even more progressive than before. Songs are complex and intricate. Clearly the band have come a long way since their first EP was released in 1990, each release saw the band getting more and more progressive, till now you can hardly see them as the same band they were only six years before, ordinary death metal songs turned to metal songs with prog influences, that in the next album was reduced to riffs inside a prog song, and now are gone completely leaving us with a pure 100% progressive extreme metal.

The music as before is a wild mix between the extreme metal, jazz and avant-garde, it's not too freaky, the avant parts are all combined inside the music and that's what makes it so progressive. The riffs are outstanding and powerful ranging from slow doomy stuff to fast intricate guitars, solos are just right, the playing is excellent. Bass by Dan Swano has a groovy sound, he likes to use chorus effect on his guitar as he did before, which gives the music a more melodic touch, he goes along with the music and have some really good ideas. After the bomb unleashed on our ears is over, "Behrial" an ambient track comes to ease are minds, beautiful track, done only with keys and some drums, which i feel, have a reason for it's being there, ending this trilogy. Overall the band is as tight as ever and it is always a pleasure listening to those great musicians. Too bad this one is their last album and we haven't heard anything from them for the past 16 years, this is one of the few comebacks i would like to see sometime in the close future.

In conclusion for their last album Pan.Thy.Monium definitely went all the way, expanding their ideas further more and presenting us with what i consider their best album. For those of you interested in extreme metal but still gotta have that prog, you can not go wrong with this one or with anything by this band actually. Inovative, progressive, powerful and totally awsome this is 5 stars.