Spirale

Labirintas

Written by: BV on 20/06/2013 19:30:05

Spirale is an experimental/progressive rock outfit from Vilnius, Lithuania that is not only obscure to me it seems, but to the general public as well if one is to trust the number of ’likes’ garnered by their Facebook page. Now, ‘likes’ aren’t everything and I was therefore quite certain that I shouldn’t dismiss these guys just yet – after all, I had been promised experimental prog-rock – how bad can it be?

Album opener “N” is an ominous and foreboding piece – as is a near-tradition on concept-laden albums within the progressive soundscape. The foreboding malice of the track gains my attention quickly and sets a relatively high expectation curve for me. Immediately as the track fades into “Stebimas” though, my expectations are shattered and left unfulfilled. The obnoxiously forced rhythm section lacks any inherent groove and comes off particularly ‘forced’ to my ears – as if the concentration needed to perform this track exceeded any other basic bodily function they could muster. The strange beat and the clumsy sounding riffing leaves me at a loss and gives me the impression that this, a supposed prog-rock release, will probably be one of those challenging ones when it comes to reviewing.

With “DmT” the tendency to produce a clumsy soundscape seems to continue unburdened by prior failures and gives off the immediate impression that many a song on this album just might have been created out of a sheer let’s do it because we can, fuck conventional rhythm sense kind of attitude. Granted, strange rhythms, unusual time signatures and disturbing sounds are normally my kind of thing. But on this particular release, it seems to me that Spirale are having a genuinely hard time ever accomplishing any sort of ‘real’ connection – the moment where a track reaches a higher level due to the sheer interplay between band members.

After listening through this album more than a dozen times I still fail to find many passages that I thoroughly enjoy. Granted, Spirale occasionally strike oil and come up with something more or less cool. But the dominating nature of the straining sounds the over-pretentious attempts at demanding time signatures and, well, tracks that aren’t really accessible on many levels leaves me no choice but to give up and utter a sentence I don’t usually find myself uttering: I really don’t dig this album and I am almost certain that I will probably never ‘re-discover’ it on my cd-shelf. Yes, someone might find this particular release tantalizing but I am most definitely not one of them. I commend the effort though, but there is vast room for improvement on this.

Download: N, Spirale
For The Fans Of: The New Slave, Pryapisme
Listen: facebook.com

Release Date 27.03.2013
Self-released


Related Items | How we score?
Comments
comments powered by Disqus

Legal

© Copyright MMXXIV Rockfreaks.net.