It’s staggering, really. There were clues on the child prodigy’s debut ‘Open Heart Zoo’, a far reaching zero-gravity melding of Trent Reznor’s and Jeff Buckley’s metallic ores, but that was an altogether more beautiful and usual record than this is. This is a brutal opus. A dense trilogy of epics rolled tight into one. And it has no consideration for you or I. It flits violently between personalities and postures and is hugely draining on your resources. But every last detail is so exquisite. From ethereal twinkling ambience to ribcage-strippingly ferocious grind to every stage in between, this is a record that he promised to make from the moment he filled his boots full of Lexus’ cash, along with some ad-libbing from his wildest dreams.
Mars Volta are obvious peers, and the one reason that we can accept such ambition so readily, but they’re super-sized hairy class-A-bathing mutant desert freakoids from the hall of mirrors of our darkest thoughts, he’s a young and relatively retiring chap from Aylesbury. Which makes his achievement greater, no? The clearest difference amongst the multitude screams like the rings of Venus, the imposing orchestral pomposity like a village-uprooting tribe of hurricanes and the track lengths like the a triple jump in space, is that this feels like real deluxe emotion, expanded on and exaggerated. It doesn’t feel fictional. So as ridiculous as it is you can believe it, most of the time.
It’s full of the hippie space rock and guillotine guitars of fellow steel-coated accessible Brit proggers Muse, but Grech goes a great gravity free leap forward here, or at least out of the main slipstream. There are the strictly epic epics, the multi-faceted 8 minute ‘Guiltless’ and eye-of-the-storm-apocalyptic 9 minute growth of ‘Holy Father Inferior’. There is the heavy furor of Deftones or System Of A Down in ‘I Am Chromosome’ and ‘Worldly Divine’ and the serene needle-and-thread majesty of the gothic ‘Venus’, the blissful ‘An End’ which with its dark depths could slide comfortably onto Radiohead’s ‘Amnesiac’, and the desperately beautiful Buckley-redux ‘Elixir’.
It’s an unholy trinity that ensures separation and pace, like the serving of multitude courses at a gothic banquet, a truly calculated teasing of the senses. Just to recap; staggering, really staggering.