Label: Inside Out Records
Release date: September 4, 2015
Production: Riverside
Album length: 60.25 min
Genre: Progressive Rock
If there’s a band anywhere on the planet right now that’s expanding its artistic expression and musical character with exponential energy, basking in the glow of absolute free-spirited originality, it’s got to be the Poles Riverside. Over 14 years of existence the band has gone through a major artistic transition. And the evolution just keeps going and going. Today we can safely count Riverside among the most important bands keeping all the allure and evergreen appeal of everything that stands behind the term progressive rock! If the Brits have Steven Wilson and Porcupine Tree in that department, and the Swedes have Opeth, the third European band is definitely Riverside.
Every album by the band has hinted at a gradual stylistic shift from progressive metal to progressive rock. If we can call “Anno Domini High Definition” the most experimental album of the band’s career to date, its successor “Shrine of New Generation Slaves” (2013) marked a clear swerve toward progressive rock. Two and a half years later came the sixth studio album overall, titled “Love, Fear And Time Machine”. On it, Riverside push the softening of their sound even further, and the guitar phrases recall the band’s former metal leanings only in pinches, as a welcome ambient spice that now and then gratefully “stirs up” the course of events on the album and so keeps it dynamic.
Singer Mariusz Duda keeps growing and maturing into an excellent interpreter. This vocalist has a gorgeous natural timbre, and this time he puts it to better use than ever before. In fact, the vocal delivery is one of the main focal points of the new album. Considering that Mariusz is the author of the new album’s poetry, the deeply felt, lived-through quality of it in his vocal performance is wrapped this time in a special kind of softness and warmth, calm and inner peace, which, within the general framework of typical Riverside melancholy, creates a sense of hope and a look toward a bright future. Mariusz Duda’s voice remains the focal point of this band’s expressive essence and one of the driving engines that gives the new album, too, the clear stamp of absolute artistic uniqueness.
The album sticks to the organic from head to toe. Sonically it leans toward seventies production. The songs are built on the sound of the Mellotron, Hammond tones and classical piano. The keyboard arrangements are often an important building block of the atmospheric curtains the album sails on. Riverside have “calmed down” even more on the new album. It’s distinctly sophisticated and soft. It’s also an album where, besides the typically recognizable element of melancholy, which Riverside have always been masters of, the element of psychedelia dominates. Because of that, at moments Riverside remind you of Pink Floyd on this new record more than ever before. Especially in the closing stretch, the album, through the sequence of songs Towards the Blue Horizon (which, along with the songs Under the Pillow and Discard Your Fear, stirs up fresh associations with Steven Wilson and Porcupine Tree), Time Travellers and Found (The Unexpected Flaw of Searching), settles down completely, and the aftertaste of Pink Floyd influences is left especially by the last one, Found (The Unexpected Flaw of Searching), where shortly after the three-minute mark there’s a transition identical to one of the load-bearing transitions in the Pink Floyd song Have A Cigar. The sound across the album rests on a pronounced layering of guitar and keyboard lines, and the symbiosis between the two instruments is downright fascinating. The laying down of motifs against the backdrop of the soundscape is entirely unpretentious and subordinated to building a lofty atmosphere, so strong and commanding that it can whisk you off in an instant to a parallel world beyond reality (if you dare to let the music lead you there).
Love Fear And The Time Machine is special in one more way. It’s far more compact than its predecessor and therefore the easiest album to win over to that the band has made in its career so far. That means it has an extraordinary musicality of a kind Riverside hadn’t managed to develop until now. The motifs go straight into your ear, while their ideational branching and variety never for a moment give off any feeling of self-replication. Preserving artistic distinctiveness in the musical universe while standing firmly on the borderline between compositional complexity and pronounced musicality is, in the 21st century, the mark of great stature in the artistic craft of individual musical talents, and Riverside undoubtedly belong among them!
This time the album’s messages take us through a transition of mental state, where you run into childhood and its virginal naivety and sincerity. This is the point where the presence of naive love first collides with the will to control, dominate, appropriate – that is, with everything that breeds fear in our hearts. The message goes even deeper. It rests on the mission of the individual to overcome this tug-of-war between love and fear, because fear is the energy of a dark force, the thing that has been eating away at the planet ever since humans settled it and ever since they declared themselves the only “rational” being. Still, the album offers a sense of hope. Riverside leave a ray of sunlight at the end of the tunnel. It’s the ray that lights up and cleanses the soul, gives you the life force to stay strong even in temptation, when fear takes hold of you along with all those other emotions that push you toward negative acts. If you can fend off those temptations as a mature arbiter full of real emotional and spiritual intelligence, then you can become a better person, one who can generate positive energy and share it with nature, which you’re a part of — or, given humankind’s senselessly destructive streak, let’s soften the thesis and say: which you supposedly should be a part of.
“Love, Fear And The Time Machine” is a new top-shelf album confirming that Riverside keep reaching, very successfully, for fresh challenges, which they masterfully work, in a melting pot of absorbed big ideas, into a format of absolute artistic originality. In keeping with the album’s basic message, the poetry is atmospherically magnified and literally comes alive when the music soaks you into its world. This is an album of pronounced unpretentiousness, inner peace and serenity, which, alongside the typical melancholy, feels distinctly soft and organic, and at the same time exceptionally musical, while also carrying, on top of all that, an undisguised streak of psychedelia. An album of the band’s new and highly successful musical transition, of fully tangible musical substance, that never stops thrilling in its uniqueness.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 9.0 / 10
Track list:
1. Lost (Why Should I Be Frightened By a Hat?) (5:52)
2. Under the Pillow (6:47)
3. #Addicted (4:52)
4. Caterpillar and the Barbed Wire (6:56)
5. Saturate Me (7:08)
6. Afloat (3:11)
7. Discard Your Fear (6:42)
8. Towards the Blue Horizon (8:09)
9. Time Travelers (6:42)
10. Found (The Unexpected Flaw of Searching) (4:03)
Lineup:
Mariusz Duda – vocals, bass guitar, acoustic guitar, ukulele
Piotr Grudzinski – guitar
Michal Lapaj – keyboards, Hammond organ
Piotr Kozieradzki – drums
