Label: InsideOut Music
Release date: February 14, 2020
Production: Ulrich Wild
Album length: 58.51 min
Genre: Progressive Metal
Rating: 9.5 / 10
Did any of you happen to find yourselves, completely out of the blue, at Ljubljana’s Cvetličarna on March 10, 2011, back when that venue still hosted metal shows, among other things? That day Nevermore and Symphony X played as a package with co-headliner set lengths (and, sadly, dreadful sound), and before them came a band far older in tenure than either of the two, with roots going deep into the eighties. Just a year before this band showed up in Ljubljana (that night even Rok didn’t hide his enthusiasm for the singer’s get-up – review of the gig HERE), Psychotic Waltz had revived their activities. The band put out their last album, and up to then their fifth overall, “Bleeding”, in 1996. A full ten more years then passed before we got a sixth one, “The God-Shaped Void”. That’s a hefty 24 years, and to be more precise, Psychotic Waltz today are running in the original lineup, the very same one that released their last album, “Mosquito”, 26 years ago.
And when you listen to the material on “The God-Shaped Void”, which is far from an easy bone to gnaw on, the feeling is incredible. Incredible in terms of how solid and coherent Psychotic Waltz sound even today. There’s definitely something to it. They’ve played a lot of shows together in recent years, and there are no games of hide-and-seek among the guys anyway. They know each other very well. The main creative nucleus of the band, which brings the fundamental compositional ideas from which the dark, even sullen and melancholic progressive metal songs are then born, has been preserved and still runs on full inspiration. It’s an extremely welcome realization that “The God-Shaped Void” is an album you’d bet your hand on having been made three years after its predecessor at most. Judging by the songwriting style, as well as the fact that Devon Graves’ voice hasn’t “aged” in the slightest, or become worn out, tired, frayed. The vocalist simply shines with the variety and inventiveness of his vocal lines, shows real youthful fire, great passion and doesn’t skimp on emotion. Just listen to how many approaches he takes in one of the creative peaks of the new album, the song The Fallen.
There’s almost an hour of music on the album, but believe me, not a single second is too much. The compositions are exceptionally strong, compact, polished in how the motifs fit together and in the links between verses and bridges. The mid-eight passages are a chapter of their own, and the band masterfully flips the established mood completely upside down through highly creative, skillfully chosen modulations of rhythms and riffs, always deftly wriggling out of it and bringing the song back, in a glow of highly theatrical dynamics, to the main motif (e.g. Sisters of Dawn or especially the villainous While The Spiders Spin). Fresh ideas and creative charge are here in abundance on “The God-Shaped Void”.
The band also weaves in a pile of acoustic motifs, which it uses to triumphantly contrast the moods on the album. These even touch on Celtic tunes (Demystified (with a flute motif woven in), the closing In the Silence). The moods are dark, melancholic, depressive, and rise on the bosom of general disillusionment. Not a pinch of sugar. A shadowy, obscure album, and the band has the art of building atmospheres down to the last detail. The album grabs the listener, sucks them into its peculiar atmosphere and doesn’t let go of its claws until the final note.
Psychotic Waltz are progressive metallers with their own defined and unique voice. It’s hard to find parallels for them, and that task always seems very stepmotherly toward the band. Unfair. But if you have to, call to mind old Fates Warning and add a bit of the depressive rhetoric of, say, Nevermore (e.g. the chorus of Stranded), yet the result is entirely homegrown and one of a kind. It’s all said right in the opener Devils And Angels, an exceptional adventure into the peculiar world of Psychotic Waltz’s music, which instantly picks up the thread from the album “Bleeding”.
The beauty of Psychotic Waltz is that they’re prog-metallers “in the true sense of the word”. Everything is dosed in just the right amounts. They don’t drag things out, they don’t flex their muscles in ego-tripping urges to show off ultra-shreds of unimaginable technical bravura, but diligently build on a combination of signature phrases and atmospheric mysteries. In fact, as the name itself hints, they sound psychotic, at moments truly mildly cerebral-psychedelic. But that’s just extra spice on this truly phenomenal product. That the band comes from the old school of American speed metal is confirmed by the downright fantastic short but solid metal slap called Back To Black. That metal is by now really an “old fart” is hinted at by All The Bad Men, with a classic old-school American riff that crawls through the verse quite shamelessly Black Sabbath-style. One of the inserts in Pull The Strings also reminds us that Psychotic Waltz grew up as teenagers on the sound of the famous Birmingham four-piece, who committed the original sin 50 years ago.
As said. A brilliant product. As if 24 years hadn’t passed between it and its studio predecessor, but three at most. An album from head to toe full of fresh ideas and great compositional variety, dizzying leaps between moods, a pronounced gloomy drama theater of final doom and occult ominousness. Progressively challenging in just the right dose, so that the album delivers a constant sense of high tension and sweet shock therapy in how events unfold within the otherwise complexly built compositions (without being a drag, at the same time). An album that fans of the band and lovers of an unsugared, down-to-earth approach, cut in the old American school of metal, will grab with both hands. A favorite for the cream of the crop of this year’s best metal albums. Welcome home, boys. Let’s hope “The God-Shaped Void” isn’t your last act.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Devils and Angels (6:30)
2. Stranded (4:49)
3. Back to Black (3:53)
4. All the Bad Men (3:59)
5. The Fallen (5:49)
6. While the Spiders Spin (5:49)
7. Pull the String (4:54)
8. Demystified (5:13)
9. Season of the Swarm (5:58)
10. Sisters of the Dawn (6:41)
11. In the Silence (5:16)
Line-up:
Devon Graves – vocals, flute
Dan Rock – guitar, keyboards
Brian McAlpin – guitar
Ward Evans – bass guitar
Norman Leggio – drums
