Label: Insideout Music
Release date: February 12, 2021 (reissue) / September 21, 2004 (release date on The Laser’s Edge)
Production: Riverside
Album length: 53.11 min.
Genre: Progressive Rock
Rating: 9.0/10
“Out of Myself” is the studio debut of Polish prog-rock sensation Riverside. So why review it now, when the album came out back in 2003? This past February it got a reissue (including several different colors of vinyl) on Insideout Music, and the sound has been freshened up and remastered too.
This album has been pressed more than once over the years. It first came out in 2003 in Poland only, then in 2004 on The Laser’s Edge, which helped spread the word about this hugely promising new band worldwide. “Out of Myself” is also the only Riverside album that has stayed “overlooked and unreviewed” on RockLine to this day, so this reissue comes as a perfectly timed alibi. Anyway, the real point is elsewhere, and it couldn’t be more obvious: this is an outstanding achievement. Especially when you weigh in that it’s a debut. Debuts usually lay naivety bare. They’re about trying things out, a sort of document where bands are still hunting for their sound and still feeling their way artistically, getting to know themselves. Not so with “Out of Myself”. Riverside walked onto the scene with it as a band with a sound and style already chiseled out. Original, homegrown, and let’s even say eclectic.
Sure, “Out of Myself” has musical parallels with other bands, but funnily enough, whenever you start stringing associations together, the ones that sneak into your head are bands with a clear, original artistic ID card: Pink Floyd, Porcupine Tree, the “artistically transformed” Anathema, and at moments even Pain of Salvation (also Green Carnation, or a bit of Soen). But hold on. This is about weighing up atmosphere. First and foremost, those intense mood states that carry you off into such associations. First you have to get your head around a band formed in Poland. Riverside are oddballs precisely because they come from Poland. Their emotional core is their creative compass, the inspiration that has always driven and propelled them artistically. That’s why this is a band that bets everything on intensifying moods. Opener The Same River confirms it: in a good twelve minutes it lays out the whole condensed form of the band’s artistic character and musical direction. This track is the entire starting point, with all the elemental seeds of development that guarantee the band’s further artistic growth and transformation across a series of future studio albums.
With their debut, Riverside had already built a musical format that, interestingly, brings two completely different musical worlds, with completely different genre followers, under one roof. Because the band is strictly devoted to creating gripping atmospheres, it reaches the intensity of those states mostly through repetition of lead phrases, which can loop on and on as if programmed while the band has already layered two or three new ones on top. That hypnotic state, which the band creates from opener The Same River onward, is a platform that brings prog rock and post-rock fans aboard the same ship. And when you add the fear, rage, fury and anger of the debut’s title track, Riverside become attractive to prog metal fans, or metalheads in general, too.
The debut alone shows off the band’s compositional power, laying bare many faces right at the start of their career. Among them is an esoteric, cerebral moment that rules the prog-rock empiricism and sustains an exceptionally alluring magnetism in the listening, combining highly perceptive musicality with gripping atmospheres. There’s the distinctive, charismatic and instantly recognizable vocal character of bassist Mariusz Duda, and the free-flowing, layered, finely honed pedigree of guitar playing from the excellent Piotr Grudzinski, who effortlessly hops from painting soundscapes with sustain-heavy “Gilmouresque” or “Floydisms” to biting guitar phrasing, and everything in between. That this is a band with no shortage of appetite for experimenting is also shown by the trombone on The Curtain Falls. Everything is subordinated to feelings, emotions and passions, which drive the development of the album’s moods.
The album is a mix of idiosyncratic psychedelic rock and progressive rock, with metallized touches, while the hypnosis of repetitive, looped patterns can appeal to post-rock fans too. All of this capitalizes on an internalized sense of concise musicality, and the winning formula of a highly intelligent, one-of-a-kind artistic creation is born. Even if we set aside the remastered refresh of the reissue, which does upgrade the original soundscape through contrast, “Out of Myself” got exceptionally good production from the very start as a debut.
It’s interesting to look back today at its first release, eighteen years ago. Especially after the seventh album “Wasteland” (2018). Where did the band start, and where have they ended up artistically? The first three albums don’t yet show as pronounced an artistic gap as the later ones, especially after the daringly experimental “Anno Domini High Definition” (2009). Even in 2021, “Out of Myself” counts as one of the best debuts in the history of progressive rock. Let’s be precise: in the more modern, post-millennial era of the last twenty years, which is something many bands at the start of their careers can only dream about.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. The Same River (12:01)
2. Out of Myself (3:43)
3. I Believe (4:14)
4. Reality Dream (6:15)
5. Loose Heart (4:50)
6. Reality II (4:45)
7. In Two Minds (4:38)
8. The Curtain Falls (7:59)
9. OK (4:46)
Lineup:
Mariusz Duda – vocals, bass guitar, acoustic guitar
Piotr Grudziński – guitar
Jacek Melnicki – keyboards
Piotr Kozieradzki – drums, percussion
Guest musician:
Krzysztof Melnicki – trombone on track no. 9
