Artist: Prymary
Label: Progrock Records
Release: 2009
Length: 57:02
Rating: 3/5
Prymary are a progressive metal band from Southern California, and they’re back with their third studio album. Just like its predecessor “Tragedy Of Innocence”, “The Enemy Inside” is a concept record. It wrestles with unfulfilled dreams and the personal traumas the average individual of the modern age has to face. The lyrics are self-contained confessional pieces (you could call them the album’s chapters), but the theme of dehumanization from the previous sentence runs through the whole thing like a red thread.
Prymary are a dark band. Their sound owes the most to Dream Theater, first and foremost. The difference is that Prymary are a good deal more obscure, and they season their sound with more spice from the fast, intricately built old-school early heavy metal (speed metal) that developed in North America through the eighties. Looking for hints? Fates Warning. Yep. And yet, where Fates Warning leave off, “superprog” metallers Redemption are close by. And one more thing: drummer Chris Quirarte is also the drummer of Redemption. So the parallels between Prymary and Redemption hardly come as a surprise.
Prymary’s progressive metal falls into the category of the more demanding bands that the cradle of the USA has produced over the years. They play almost mathematically. Motifs follow each other in jolts and string the songs’ development together completely out of the blue. That keeps the shock element sharp, and the album boasts big dynamics and a richly varied, wave-like mood. In short, the stamp of unpredictability is there from start to finish, and that is very, very good.
As far as sound goes, Prymary don’t offer anything new. They try to hide that behind the fragmentation of the songs, from which you only pull out the red thread after many, many listens. Yep. “The Enemy Inside” is a tougher album to crack, and it’s right only for those prog metal fans with the toughest nerves. The whole thing wouldn’t be the least bit interesting if it didn’t blow you away with outstanding technique and serious schooling. Prymary are extremely skilled. They live in scales and handle them with downright reckless abandon. They play extremely fast, passing motifs around like deft jugglers and linking them with vivid, progressively fractured transitions as skillfully as a spider spins its web.
The production is excellent, and the band delivers a lively, dynamic, varied picture in which the instruments and the centrally placed vocals hit the desired balance. The real quality of the production is that the tearing bass, with its thick, hefty swings, is pushed up front and literally cuts through the mix with its shoving. Quirarte is a drumming maniac who doesn’t trail Portnoy one bit, shaking out the most impossible fill combinations and, as if in a trance, using every last scrap of space to season it with breakneck drum acrobatics. Then there’s the devilishly fast guitar soloing, which at times feels like the chosen solo has no end in sight, as eagerly as it bites into the bait of improvisation on offer.
The vocals, though, are the factor that works as a fan sieve here. They offer a mix of Charlie Dominici (ex-Dream Theater, Dominici), Ted Leonard (Enchant) and Ray Alder (Fates Warning), and on top of everything they’re incredibly obscure. So: high vocals. Aimed at the high registers. On top of that there’s a slight crackly shrillness, and with the deliberate added “whimpering” it can come across as endlessly annoying. I’m not saying the vocals don’t fit. They’re just so different and sinusoidally one-dimensional that for more sensitive listeners, the ones with a low irritation threshold, they can “tear up” the brain’s association cortex. So whoever accepts the vocals as they are will be richly rewarded by the music “The Enemy Within” has to offer. The vocals chase lines that, in the chosen melodies, sound deliberately psychedelic in places. That mixing of the less demanding and the more demanding melody is typical of the arrangement in the 20-minute closing epic Trial And Tragedy.
“The Enemy Inside” is, in principle, an album that lacks absolutely nothing. In its uncompromising, progressively tuned metal it fires from every cannon available, so after 57 minutes of listening you end up slumped exhausted in your armchair. It’s exactly this machine-gunning with an endless pleiad of motifs that’s the excessive element, and it shows the band doesn’t think much about offering highly melodic catchiness on the album. They carelessly chop and grind unrestrained through complex structures that only settle into your ears after repeated listens. If they do at all. Once you finally work your way to the song Disillusion, it will rob you of your last shred of sanity, so enviably unlistenable is it by design (vocals included).
“The Enemy Inside” is a heavy album, meant for more demanding listeners. If you like the newer Dream Theater, Redemption or Pain Of Salvation, you’ll surely find plenty to like in Prymary too! If you can absorb the seriously specific vocals and make them your own, then “The Enemy Within” will serve you a heaping helping of musical pleasure. But if you demand a clear, defined melody, the kind prog metal bands like Angra or Symphony X cultivate, don’t waste your time on it.
Lineup
Jackson Haskett – vocals
Sean Entrikin – guitar
Neil McQueen – keyboards
Rob Young – bass guitar
Chris Quirarte – drums
Production
Prymary
Tracklist
1. The Enemy Inside (Part 1) (4:27)
2. The Enemy Inside (Part 2) (4:33)
3. The Enemy Inside (Part 3) (2:45)
4. The Enemy Inside (Part 4) (4:18)
5. The Enemy Inside (Part 5) (2:14)
6. Inflicted (5:00)
7. Disillusion (6:15)
8. Edge of Discovery (6:57)
9. Trial and Tragedy (20:33)
