Artist: Riverside
Label: Inside Out Records
Release: 2009
Duration: 44:44
Rating: 4.5/5
Riverside are an exceptional addition to the progressive scene and a breath of fresh air, especially at a time when the prog metal movement has lost a bit of its edge and is short on fresh blood that would draw from the well of its own creative inspiration, the real guarantee of a unique identity. “Anno Domini High Definition” is Riverside’s fourth studio album, and with it the guys take another developmental step in their own singular engraving of musical artistry. Not only does it confirm the band’s uniqueness once again, it also widens, deepens and sharpens its existing landmarks, pushing them up to a higher level of quality and a new musical form.
The Poles have been cultivating their recognizable character since the very beginning of their career. Since the debut. And right from the start they staked out a few trademarks of their approach that are unmistakably theirs. First of all there’s the vocal, which carries its own color, and second, and perhaps even more important, a rich, massive wall of sound that guarantees a special, dark and cataclysmic atmosphere, often reinforced with programmed samples, added in a witty, simple, honest and above all elegant way, though one that can also blow this trademark of the band up to bizarre proportions.
This time too we get to enjoy the richly arranged and layered sonic backdrop that holds up and supports the vocal. Alongside the dynamic, lively blasting created by the metal guitar riffing, Riverside loosen up those guitar phrases with sound effects and programmed samples that can serve up the illusion of polyrhythm, but above all they extend the band’s expressive range, since they’re a key creator of the dramatic, high-intensity mood that never lets up across the album. In this kind of arranging, “Anno Domini High Definition” is a step up from the band’s previous three albums. The keyboards occasionally reach for an organ sound, whose harmony fills out and widens the spectrum of the album’s sonic picture even further.
With Riverside there are no misfires. All the building blocks live on the same wavelength, communicate brilliantly, and cunningly trade off dynamic switches in the swell of a rich, true-to-life atmosphere, where the vocal sermon, set in such a united and mutually compatible instrumental weave, comes alive damn successfully. This morbid atmosphere, loaded with melancholy, which isn’t hard to pick up on in Polish bands generally, should be tailor-made for fans of English “mourners” like Porcupine Tree on one side, or, in a diametrically opposite parallel, even a band like Arena (in its heaviest production version). Of course the stuff is made from a different dough, but the feelings that are born in the listener create fitting correlations between the bands. In the end only the final vibration counts. It doesn’t matter how you get there. What matters is that it gets under your skin and convinces you that this time the game is for real.
Two tracks stand out on the album: Left Out and Hybrid Times. These are the longest songs. Their longer instrumental passages follow the mosaic jigsaw of the songs like clearly distilled fragments of motifs that fit together like a key and a lock. So it’s precisely these parts of the songs that grab absolute attention in Riverside’s playing, where the band sounds especially convincing in its mastery of building up mood by stringing together many leading motifs. The blending of riff-heavy blasting and rhythmic turns that skillfully negotiate between heavier rhythmic textures and trivially defined ones, plus the colorful use of keyboards, adds up to material that’s tailor-made for music gourmets, who will be able to enjoy it for a long time and peel back its “veils”.
The band often creates contrast by setting the sound of the organ against the live guitar riffing, or, in the parts where guitar riffing loses its primacy, by setting more classical keyboard sounds and programmed samples against a sharp, voluminous and melodically exploratory bass line. In this respect Hybrid Times is the absolute winner of the record, especially in the stretch where the band flirts with the findings of “goa trance” music itself. Constantly on the edge of provocation, smashing established frameworks, setting new boundaries and discovering new musical horizons.
Right alongside Hight Times, the middle instrumental section of Egoist Hedonist (a definition of a Slovenian politician for Anno Domini 2010) works no less provocatively and uniquely in its own way. There, next to the aforementioned “trance”-style sampling (in a tasteful shade), the band throws in a woodwind attack in one of the motifs, which in Riverside’s hands once again effectively whip up the dynamics and keep the listener in suspense, wondering what on earth awaits in the next chunk of the song. The unpredictability factor that fans of progressively conceived metal or rock crave is fantastically magnified and put front and center on this record.
The vocal is fully immersed in the verses. From subtle melancholy it can in a moment rise into obsessed screaming, even fire off the occasional “growl”, and so string together a multitude of emotional states that come across as astonishingly real. The guys deepen the atmosphere further by having the vocal use “echo” sound effects.
One more thing. Riverside do offer a cross-dialogue between guitar and keyboard soloing, but they stay true throughout to a vow to the lofty mood they follow, and they can’t betray it. So you’ll never be treated to a machine-gunning of notes drawn from highly conservatory-trained polish.
“Anno Domini High Definition” is, as Riverside’s fourth studio album, by far the band’s most challenging, expressively richest and most complexly structured record. At the same time it’s thrilling how a truly morbid blackness like this could be captured in the studio, one that steers the album’s basic emotional state from the center of attention. Despite all the sonic and arrangement diversity, it offers a red thread, compactness, a clearly defined shape and a feeling that Riverside have reached a stage of artistic development where the band members breathing for “the same thing” has hit its creative zenith. An album I deeply recommend to the most spoiled music listeners. Let’s just hope that Riverside, in this peak period of their own artistic creativity, keep spoiling us for a long time to come, just like they do with “Anno Domini High Definition”. A band that’s fairly bursting with being warmed up to just the right working temperature.
Lineup
Mariusz Duda – vocals, bass guitar, acoustic guitar
Piotr GrudziŠ
Production
Riverside & Szymon Czech
Tracklist
1. Hyperactive (5:45)
2. Driven To Destruction (7:06)
3. Egoist Hedonist (8:56)
4. Left Out (10:59)
5. Hybrid Times (11:53)
