Kev Rowland
Caliban have been creating quite a noise in the metalcore scene since their inception in the late Nineties, and with the quintet managing to keep the same line-up together for fifteen years now is quite an achievement. Here they are back with the follow-up to 2016’s ‘Gravity’, and they seem to have increased the intensity in all areas. “’Elements’ is a logical progression from the last album,” says guitarist Marc Görtz. “But we definitely expanded the range of music we wanted to incorporate on ‘Elements’. It’s going in extremely different directions. It’s heavier, but also more melodic. Also, Andy is doing all the vocals—harsh and clean—on the new album.” This last is a change, as those duties are normally shared between Andreas Dörner and guitarist Denis Schmidt with competing styles, but here Dörner provides both melodic and gruff. Görtz says that when he started putting together the initial riffs for the album he was trying really hard not to listen to any other music so that he wasn’t influenced, but bands such as Meshuggah, Whitechapel and Trivium all seem to have made their way into his psyche.
It is the intensity that really blast out of the speakers and pins the listener against the far wall – if ever the States want to militarise music then they should look to this album to start with. That the band go between incredibly light and tremendously heavy only emphasises the difference between the two styles. They can keep it low and groove-ridden, suddenly knocking down the guitar tuning, or keep it riff-laden as if they are a new Cannibal Corpse before becoming a next generation Linkin Park. This is all over the place, so much so that one never knows quite where the musical journey is going to lead, except that it will be a fractured and enjoyable road to get there. Caliban are showing no sign at all of slowing down, and this may just be their finest release yet.