Self-released
Release date: September 18, 2020
Production: Maciej Meller
Album length: 45.04 min
Genre: Progressive Rock
Rating: 9.5/10
If you caught at least one of the three Slovenian tour stops of Polish progressive rock sensation Riverside, this year or last, then you’ll know who Maciej Meller is. Since the end of February 2017, this guy has been handling guitar duties in Riverside. Over the years of sticking to their guns, they’ve grown into a hugely respected musical entity on the international scene, with a rock-solid base of loyal fans. Only this year did Riverside grant Meller full-member status. He’s known Riverside boss Mariusz Duda for years, since the two play together in the trio Meller-Gołyźniak-Duda, and that Meller is a musician with serious mileage and no greenhorn is confirmed by the 45-year-old’s work in the progressive rock band Quidam, which actually grew out of the hard rock outfit Deep River in the early nineties. By 2012, Quidam had put out six studio albums.
From day one, when he started helping out Riverside as a replacement for the late guitarist Piotr Grudzinski, Meller was seen as the band’s most logical choice. Why that is, is confirmed by his past live performances and the mark he left on “Wasteland” (RockLine review) back when he was still a guest studio musician, and it’s now confirmed again by his first solo studio effort: the album “Zenith”. “Zenith” is one of those releases from this year that you can count among the quiet ones, announced with little to no pomp. The Covid-19 pandemic drastically shook up how people plan their time, and Meller found a creative space to finish his sketches and wrap them up into a complete whole. His Riverside boss Mariusz Duda, for example, treated himself to recording a new Lunatic Soul album.
In terms of artistic character, both production and style, “Zenith” is frankly a real (small) discovery for Riverside fans. If you like Riverside, especially from the “Shrine of New Generation Slaves” era (2013, RockLine review) onwards, “Zenith” will fit you like a glove. The album is soaked in melancholy and mysticism too. The cover art already hints at that kind of musical substance. It radiates gloom, darkness and claustrophobic hopelessness, a wandering through a stuffy fog you could cut into slices, even though the sun is at its zenith. But its rays can’t pierce the thick fog. Not for a long time now. In a way, the cover symbolizes humanity’s current estrangement from nature. Man, who since the very first day he declared himself the only rational being has been trying, in his own madness, to subdue nature and its laws and become the absolute ruler of the universe. Instead of learning from it, he fears it and so tries to dominate it. All he reaps is disaster and a headlong rush toward the abyss of self-destruction. This prog adventure radiates an atmosphere of yearning melancholy and the trembling of a soul that never stops hoping and longing, across 45 minutes of fascinating, enchanting musical odyssey. In it, all the boundless pain and sorrow can’t be screamed or sobbed out, because there’s simply too much of both. The shackles remain. Even if invisible. The further east and north you go, the darker and more cramped the world gets.
“Zenith” lays bare the musical influences that sculpted Meller into the artist he is. First and foremost, the foundation of it all is his fascination with the achievements of the seventies prog pioneers: you can hear Pink Floyd in his guitar playing and in the guitar tones, which are treated with heavy sustain and echo/delay tricks, while some of the grandly gripping arrangements, vocal melodies included, draw on Genesis’s sense of musical aesthetics. But since it’s 2020, everything has of course been brought up to date. “Zenith” is an album with a musical charisma all its own. Modernized in production and sound and, as said, close to the hearts of fans of Riverside, Porcupine Tree, the first three Steven Wilson solo albums, or the one and only album by the short-lived project Sound of Contact, which was fronted by Phil Collins’s son Simon. In spots the album carries traces of psychedelia and space rock too (the track Trip).
What “rescues” Meller from potential artistic mediocrity on his solo outing is a crew of exceptional musicians. Standing out first among them is vocalist Krzysztof Borek. He’s got a magical voice. He couldn’t fit the compositional structure of the songs any more snugly. It’s a voice that could easily be an integral part of any British neo-prog band. Since he leans here and there, gently, toward Collins (Simon rather than Phil), some of the arrangements, in their theatrical musical presence, get an even stronger stamp of Genesis inspiration. Borek is nonetheless developing a vocal charisma of his own. Just like his countryman Mariusz Duda. Both vocalists are far too important as building blocks of the musical identity of the bands they belong to. With “Zenith”, it’s certain that an album with such a solid atmospheric reach could never have come to life without a vocalist like this.
“Zenith” is a hugely varied and colorful album in terms of ideas. It has exceptional musicality and intense shifts of mood. When it comes to creating strong backdrops for the soundscape, the arrangements are multi-faceted. They can be completely organic, built on acoustic guitar and piano (the yearning ballad Plan B). The album is backed at every step by a diverse palette of keyboard sounds, while Meller delicately supports the compositions in places with programmed sampling, which puts the cherry on top of the contrasting, intense atmosphere. The focus of the album is the development of gripping atmosphere, not a showcase of Meller’s guitar acrobatics. The album feels like a band album, even though it belongs to a solo artist.
Meller’s guitar works primarily as an extra tool for contrastingly intensifying the moods of this album. In parts of the compositions it steps fully aside to make room for synth palettes, programmed loops and classical piano, and then the guitar suddenly takes the focal point, charging into the lead melodies and conjuring moods of transcendence and hypnosis. This is confirmed right from the start by the rather classically shaped solo in the track Aside, where Meller owes a debt of thanks to Gilmour. Knife is a contrasting continuation. If Aside sounded at least a little optimistic and awakening (especially the opening motif), Knife is one of the darkest points of the album, where the burden of building the soundscape falls to a fascinating combination of classical piano and a programmed sample. The keyboards also borrow pastel shades of electric piano (a sound close to a Rhodes), much like Riverside do.
Where Meller explodes on guitar in an especially fascinating way is captured in one of the album’s most gripping moments, Frozen, a track full of musical contrasts strung together through a succession of lead motifs. Prog gourmets, though, will go especially nuts for Trip. It’s a straight-up blast into a psychic state of total intoxication where space and time vanish. It captures a brilliant development of hypnotic structures where it’s worth fully switching off your consciousness. Meller’s guitar melody, backed by a pronounced sustain effect, dominates especially in the second half of the track and delivers one of the album’s atmospheric peaks, one that would raise the eyebrows of Steve Hackett as well as his disciples Nick Barrett (Pendragon) and Steve Rothery (Marillion). Although this part of the track is downright triumphant in its sensual haughtiness, the band also made sure to loosen up the rhythmic structures, with the drums slipping into the bosom of freewheeling improvisation. Trip is the only track Meller wrote with Mariusz Duda.
That’s only part of the album described. It’s hard to boil it all down. It carries so much information. Simply put, the album is a perfect middle path through accomplished structures of great musical appeal, combined with a looseness of motifs and a heap of cerebral prog escapes, where a supreme reconciliation of all the sonic structures reigns in the building of the soundscape. At the focal point of it all sits a brilliant, sensual and deeply expressive voice. The dialogue of this musical body is downright stunning. In its contemplation.
“Zenith” is a superb album. Sadly, it’ll go overlooked. Unless you’re a connoisseur or fan of Riverside, you’ll have a hard time connecting with Meller. If you do discover the musician, you can listen to “Zenith” for free on Meller’s Bandcamp profile. “Zenith” is one of those carefully guarded musical secrets that only a handful of the biggest prog zealots ever climb up to. Especially those who put the hypnotic allure of grand atmospheres above all else. “Zenith” grows slowly. It’s a boundless achievement that wins you over slowly because it masters all too well the charms of romanticism wedded to absolute artistic freedom.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Aside
2. Knife
3. Plan B
4. Halfway
5. Frozen
6. Fox
7. Trip
8. Magic
Line-up:
Maciej Meller – guitar, mandolin, whistle
Krzysztof Borek – vocals
Robert Szydło (Maciej Gołyźniak Trio) – bass
Łukasz Damrych – keyboards
Łukasz Sobolak – drums
Szymon Paduszyński – backing vocals on track 3
