Ok, if you don’t know this band let me warn you and invite you to open your mind to listen to some of the most unexpected, weird music to ever touch your ears. For some of you this might be torture, for some it might be interesting, for others it might be an awkward, memorable experience. Surely this band has got a ton of creativity and skill, but it’s their total weirdness that sets them apart.
First of all, who are we talking about? Pryapisme is a French experimental avant-grade metal band from Clermont-Ferrand. They just released their second album “Hyperblast Supercollider” (via Apathia Records), 3 years after their debut “Rococo Holocaust”. They basically spliced together modern progressive metal with like….everything. Especially electronic music, from weird 8-bit sounds til some dubstep and even hardcore techno and breakcore. But they also include a lot of jazz-fusion rhythmics, furious black metal intrusions, traditional symphonic rock segments, something that I venture to call “horror-influenced porn-music” and everything you could possibly desire.
Well, it might look a bit incoherent and even random… probably because it partially is. But in the roots of every track you can definitely identify a solid, well-defined background structure. This band did notsimply put together everything that could possibly go through their mind. Everything you hear in the album is meant to be there and precisely placed with a reason. Even though it’s not exactly accessible, the album is not really complex and never gets to be really noisy. It is rather incredibly catchy and melodic in its ironic and carefree attitude. The beautiful thing is that you just can’t stop listening to it because you never know what’s coming next. And since the songs are all pretty long, after some time you’ll realize you just left behind your usual reality and embarked in a sort of surreal acid trip inside a weird world that looks like a 1995 videogame with a lot of colourful pixeled cats smiling and meowing at you. And when you shake your head to wake up back to the real world, you’ll realize that it’s 5 am, you spent the whole night listening to this album twelve times trying to understand something, you forgot to have dinner and you have to go to work in two hours!
Well this is avant-grade metal in it’s purest (purrest?) form, after all. It is really hard to rate an album like this, I think it was actually made so that it was not possible to rate it. It mostly depends on how open-minded you are to this kind of experimentation. This stuff cannot really be reviewed, just because it’s not good or bad, it isn’t well-done or badly done. It is just weird nonsense which might be appreciated by somebody, while other people just won’t waste their time on it. You can’t come out and yell “Wow this is REAL music!!” but on the other hand you can’t say “It sucks!”
First of all, it is (probably) done to make no sense. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Second, it doesn’t suck. It is just out of your disposition, taste, interest, or probably it is just beyond your comprehension. So, if you’re looking for a emorable mindfuck, this album might get a 10/10, if you’re looking for a well-built mixture of influences in a solid and amalgamated metal experimentation melt with a heavy dose of irony, the mark would be probably very high as well. But you just can’t come here and say that this is a heavy metal milestone and an unforgettable masterpiece. It is just something that some people (unfortunately only a few people) will enjoy with a good smile on their faces, and that’s the way it should be listened to, in my opinion.
Cats \m/
-MATTIA
