UMUR "Summoning The Bygones" is the 3rd full-length studio album by Jordan, Amman based doom/death metal act Bilocate. The album was released through code666 in June 2012. It´s not everyday you come across extreme metal acts (or metal acts of any kind) from Jordan, so I was quite frankly slightly skeptical before listening to "Summoning The Bygones". Fortunately my skepticism was unfounded and "Summoning The Bygones" is proof that our middle-eastern metal brothers have come far in the last couple of years in terms of delivering professional sounding releases.

The music on the album is doom/death metal with progressive leanings. The vocals are mostly growling but Dan Swanö (Edge of Sanity, Nightingale...etc) makes a surprise clean vocal guest appearance on "Hypia" and on the closing track "A Desire to Leave III. ...Of Living". There are also sections with atmospheric talking and rare use of other clean type vocals. The music is structured in a "progressive" fashion and most tracks are long and quite intricate. The riffs and rythms are heavy (occasionally faster paced too though), there are melodic lead guitar melodies in spades and an omnipresence of synths/keyboards/pianos providing the music with a symphonic edge. The music is overall pretty polished but not lifeless or clinical.

All tracks are well composed and intriguing, which makes for an entertaining listen all the way through the 72:49 minutes long playing time. The above mentioned "Hypia" is definitely among the highlights but the Paradise Lost cover "Dead Emotion", which is so well arranged that it blends in perfectly with the rest of the material, is also a standout track. All in all "Summoning The Bygones" is a high quality release featuring excellent musicianship (I´m especially impressed by the lead guitarist Baha Farah), a powerful clear production, and as mentioned above intriguing compositions. A 3.5 - 4 star (75%) rating is fully deserved.

adg211288 Summoning the Bygones is the third album from Jordanian metal act Bilocate. Bilocate are a band I mostly see branded as either a doom metal act or an oriental metal act. Maybe the group’s first two releases can be considered as either of these things but in the case of Summoning the Bygones both only make up a small measure of the sound Bilocate have produced. For the most part we’re dealing with a melodic death metal album, of the progressive variety. The album features a guest appearance from Dan Swanö (Edge of Sanity, Star One, Nightingale et al) and also a Paradise Lost cover.

I’m just going to come right out and say here that Summoning the Bygones is a very befuddling album to me. Right from the off it hits me with what I can quickly tell is something much more than your typical melodic death metal, and this leaves me thinking that the album is about to take me on one hell of a ride in the way that only a metal band from one of the more unusual of places (in this case Jordan) for metal bands to originate can do. The sound is progressive, with keyboards/piano used prominently but tastefully in accordance to the core melodic death sound and I have to say that at a glance, Summoning the Bygones screams masterpiece potential.

But after the band has delivered a few tracks I’m left with the inescapable feeling that all there is left for the album to do is to meander its way through the remainder of its tracks until it’s conclusion over seventy minutes later with the three part A Desire to Leave. I have to confess that in my early listens of the album I couldn’t even get through it in a single sitting. Maybe the issue is that it’s around seventy-two minutes in length and it outstays its welcome somewhat. I think with the sound Bilocate have produced here, which somehow I can’t help not praise despite my feelings towards the album overall, that the album would have more impact if they shaved a good twenty or more minutes off its running time. Either that or an increase in the progressive influences to throw a few more curveballs to justify the length. Every time I try to get more into Summoning the Bygones I’m met with the same feelings though. It wows me at first, and then way before its end it’s simply boring me.

It’s not that they hit their listeners with their best stuff early on and then leave the rest of the album filled up with weaker tracks because that really isn’t the case. Taking a break anywhere in the album and starting it again later revitalises that wow factor of the music straight away, the problem simply is that in one go, for reasons that it’s difficult to put a finger on, Summoning the Bygones simply doesn’t work for me.

This is a real shame because even with this issue I can tell that Bilocate put a lot of good ideas into this album, but somewhere along the line that crucial spark that makes albums special got left behind and we’re left with an album that for all its evident positives just doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Still, Summoning the Bygones is still very much a cut above the majority of melodic death metal acts that are simply content to work within the Gothenburg sound without bringing anything exciting to the table so if nothing else Bilocate gets full marks for effort with this release. An above average rating seems fair.

6.4/10

(Originally written for Heavy Metal Haven (http://metaltube.freeforums.org))

Time Signature A deadly path...

Genre: melodic death-doom-gothic metal

Jordan might not be a country associated with heavy metal music, but make no mistake about it – the city of Amman does house a number of bands, including the highly professional band Bilocate, whose third album Summoning the Bygones is about to hit the streets.

Although genre-defining to some extent, the core sound of the tunes on this album may nonetheless be described as falling somewhere between melodic death metal and doom metal. Thus, the vocals are primarily growled (although some sections with clean vocals do appear on the album), and there are plenty of compelling guitar melodies and melodeath style riffage to complement the extreme metal vocal style. While the beats never really reach really slow doom-laden tempos, Bilocate nevertheless manage to capture pretty much the essence of death-doom metal, and several doom metal elements to occur throughout the album, and a track like 'Beyond Inner Sleep' (and the cover version of "Dead Emotions", of course) is definitely an all-out doom metal track.

This is not all, as a third central genre element that pervades the album is that of gothic metal – and we are not talking cheesy beauty-and-the-beast stuff here. The gothic influence seems more inspired by the likes of Paradise Lost and The Gathering (when they were still a metal band) and, thankfully, has more in common with the likes of Crematory and Ecnephias. Making use of synths, Bilocate generate a melancholic gothic atmosphere which quite often has an epic touch to it.

Summoning the Bygone also has a progressive edge to it – not just in the form of the overlaid piano sequences that appear on top of both distorted and clean guitars on the album, but also in form of generally dynamic song structures that, not unlike Opeth's music, combine dark and heavy metal sections with clean and mellow, but no less dark, passages. In addition, there are a number of interesting changes in tempo and mood, which ensures that the the music remains expressive at all times.

Bilocate's Summoning the Bygones is a massive effort in the progressive gothic melodic death metal department, and fans of Paradise Lost, early The Gathering, Ecnephias and Crematory should definitely check it out.

(review originally posted at seaoftranquility.org)