voila_la_scorie Customers who bought (band name) also bought “Periphery”. Cool. Let’s check them out. Hmm. The vocals are out. Next!

A few months later. Periphery again? Okay, let’s give them another shot. Nope. Not with those vocals.

Several months later. Periphery? Try. Fail.

And then the band appears on a list of top progressive metal bands. But I just can’t get passed the style of those vocals. And then “Periphery II: This Time It’s Personal” is on LoudWire’s list of 25 top prog metal albums, and I’m looking at the list and thinking, “I have 15 of those and five more are on standby in my Amazon cart. You know what? Let’s just buy the damn album and give it a fair listen.

Periphery. Progressive metal. But clearly there’s a djent approach. And there’s a metalcore style too not unlike Between the Buried & Me or Protest the Hero. Then there’s the vocals which immediately remind me of Sugar Cult or Jimmy Eat World. Emo. Powerful vocals for sure and with an edge and a harsh scream. But there’s also that plaintive heartbreaking tone that just sounds so like that, like emo pop punk. I can take it in its own genre. But here on a metal album?

The funny thing is that everything I might have had to say against this album has ultimately come to mean little or nothing. The fact is simply that I enjoy listening to this album. Okay, so it’s like Animals as Leaders without Tosin Abasi combined with Jimmy Eat World and Protest the Hero guiding the song writing and musical composition. And there’s another element which was nagging at me for two nights until I could place it: the gruff, shouted vocals remind me of Slipknot. Come to think of it, what little I know of Slipknot’s music, there’s some similarity in places. Is the tuning to dropped B, perhaps?

Well, that’s just the thing about this album. There’s so much going on that it’s easy to say, “This part reminds me of xxx in places, and xyz in other places.” I mean, there’re the djent parts, the clean and pretty echoing guitar parts, the electronic percussion parts accompanying the pretty guitars, the wild lead parts, and more emotive Jimmy Eat World-like parts, and more! I keep taking my phone out of my pocket while walking and checking what track I’m listening to and that’s a very good sign. Listen to Spencer Sotelo just belt out the note at 3:52 in “Ragnarok” or the sudden change in the music in “Facepalm Mute” from aggressive and heavy to light, atmospheric and electronic. How about the violin and proggy keyboard sound that starts off “Have a Blast”? A list could easily be made.

Now, I understand that not everyone wants this kind of music in their ears and not everyone will be accepting of the vocals simply for their style. At times I am even tempted to think the music and vocals are actually not that interesting. But then soon something comes along to perk up my ears and arrest my attention. And so, “In fact, fuck it, Nick,” I’m going to go ahead and give this album four stars. I’m not likely to go and buy another Periphery album so soon but this one here has quickly won me over. Now I’m adding Protest the Hero and Animals as Leaders to my playlist for the next week.

Kingcrimsonprog Periphery II: This Time Its Personal is the second full-length studio album by the American Metal band Periphery, it was released in 2012, following up on 2011’s Icarus EP and 2010’s self-titled debut album.

Periphery’s style of music is a highly technical and slightly progressive blend of metal, with a clear Messuggah influence in the angular low riffs and focus on rhythm as well as bursts of a much more clean and melodic side and some integration of electronic music, synths and electro drum sounds.

Alongside a number of other bands, they are considered by some to be one of the most important bands in the controversial Djent subgenre. For those who don’t know, a lot of people argue over whether or not Djent is actually a genre or not, and whether some of the bands are really just Tech-Metal and some are just Death Metal, Prog Metal or Deathcore etc …and to be fair only time will tell on that front.

If you like any other Djent or even vaguely Djent-related bands such as Tesseract, Structures, Uneven Structure, After The Burial, Born Of Osiris, After The Burial, Animals As Leaders, Vildhjart, Architects, BMTH, Sikth, Messugah, or just this sort of end of the musical spectrum in general, then they are at least worth a curiosity listen. The album contains a lot of the key features of styles like Deathcore, Metalcore, Prog Metal, Tech-Metal, Math-Metal jumbled together, with bits of electronic music added in moderation.

In fact, regardless of your opinions on the subgenre’s existence or how much you do or don’t like any of the other bands associated with it, if you have liked anything you’ve heard from Periphery thus far, this album is worth checking out.

The musical quality is very high, the quality of the production is high, there are a large amount of ideas on offer and since the album was made available for streaming by the band, overwhelming public opinion seems to say that singer Spencer Sotelo has improved immensely with the vocals.

There are also guest appearances in the form of guitar solos from John Petrucci of Dream Theater, Guthrie Govan of The Aristocrats and Wes Hauch of The Faceless.

If you have heard the pre-released single ‘Make Total Destroy’ you should have some idea of the album’s direction. There is a lot of lead guitar on this album, very brief sections of Death Vocals and Blast Beats, some spacey atmospheric passages, big clean singing parts, occasional effects-laden arpeggiated sections, and mostly a lot of crushing Djenty sections often in non-standard time signatures.

Other highlights include ‘Face Palm Mute,’ which starts off especially angular but has a lot of dynamics, with music cutting off suddenly hear and there for a drum fill or Sikth-esque fast vocal line, as well as ‘Ragnarok,’ which really displays Spencer’s vocals rather well, ‘Scarlet’ which is almost a little reminiscent of Coheed And Cambria and finally the album closer ‘Masamune.’

Overall, Periphery II should keep a lot of fans happy and is worth checking out if you have an interest in the band but haven’t yet taken the plunge. Furthermore; If you can, you should try and get the special edition with two bonus tracks; an extra instrumental track and a cover of Slipknot’s ‘The Heretic Anthem.’

ssmarcus Periphery II: This Time It’s Personal is not just an album, it’s a force of nature. Unlike Periphery I or founding guitarist Misha “Bulb” Mansour’s previous solo work which “merely” explored the possibilities afforded by modern “bedroom” production and djent style riffing, Periphery II actually combines the powers of all six of the group’s visionary and boundary pushing musicians in an effort to redefine what progressive metal was going to be in the 2010’s.

The riffs on this record display brain melting technicality and heaviness. Yet drummer Matt Halpern ensures that the polyrhythmic madness is always firmly grounded in infectious body shaking grooves. Spencer Sotelo’s blend of Randy Blythe style growls and early 2000’s screamo is a staggering display of vocal dexterity and virtuosity. And Jake Bowen’s electronic interludes help piece the disparate parts of the record into a coherent whole. No wonder Loudwire placed this record on their top 25 progressive metal albums of all-time list.

And yet despite the groups undeniable impact and power, Periphery receives more than its fair share of hate from the metal and prog gatekeepers. The inbreds over at Encyclopaedia Metallum: The Metal Archives refuse to even list Periphery while reviewers on the Prog and MM Archives have actually gone on to insult the intelligence of Periphery fans. But when it comes to art and politics, you’ll always have your reactionary fearful fascists calling out the heresies of pioneers. Thankfully, those people tend to be on the wrong side of history.

Gallifrey Hook, Line, No Sinker

I’ve noticed something I do when I’m listening to Periphery. It’s probably not something many of their other fans do, but from my impressions, Periphery’s fanbase aren’t the most intelligent or interesting bunch. When I listen to a Periphery song, especially from this album, I subconsciously filter the instrumentation, and focus entirely on Spencer’s vocal parts. It’s strange, because many, many people do the opposite, and so often Periphery have been asked to provide instrumental versions. But I just can’t afford to have this barrage of murderous noise affect my enjoyment of the great melodies that Spencer manages to come up with.

Lets be honest, Periphery have some of the worst and messiest instrumentals I have ever heard. It’s not just the farty ‘djent’ tone that they seem to still have an obsession with, it’s also the masses and masses of parts that don’t seem to blend with each other, it’s the strange need they have for putting riffs everywhere, where maybe there should be chords or textures, but they just chug everywhere and everywhen. There’s no doubt that these guys are incredibly talented. Some of them, I even have some respect for. Matt Halpern is undeniably an incredibly versatile drummer, he can play nearly every style of metal drumming with flair and technicality (although his kit tone is pretty terrible), and I also have respect for him as an entrepreneur and businessperson, with his music lesson business and drum clinics (although I wish they weren’t so expensive), and then there’s Nolly, their new British bassist, who is one of my favourite producers ever. He has produced some of my favourite underground rock records, like Natural Tendency and The Holographic Principle, but I just wish I could find some respect for him as a bassist.

I’m generally not a fan of this kind of music, as my opinions on Animals as Leaders and the like should prove, and it’s why I hate it being called ‘progressive metal’, because I never know if an album is the great progressive metal that I love, or this messy and unoriginal style of making me cringe. Yet, above all that, I still enjoy Periphery’s music, and as I mentioned before, it’s almost entirely down to their vocalist, Spencer Sotelo. Sure, they have a good riff every now and then, like the lead riff of “Scarlet”, or some of the stuff during “Ji” or “Luck As A Constant”, but it’s covered with that vomit tone and so much damn compression that I struggle to hear it. And even their atmospheres are bad, the pseudo-electronic tones they put in are just so dried up. But, I still enjoy them.

When you listen to the vocal parts over the instrumentals, you really have to gain some respect for what Spencer has to do. Listen to any of the parts, and imagine putting a vocal part over that. There are no chords, no melodies, not even many rhythms to base your part on, yet Spencer does it so flawlessly. And he does it, basically, by ignoring everything and just flying over the top. It doesn’t mix with the music well at all, and maybe that’s why so many people hate him, but at least his parts are good, unlike those guitar parts…

But seriously, pull the vocals from this album and I’d be struggling to give it a score above 3.5/10. The riffs are sloppy and without defined rhythm or key, and the solos are beyond awful. Shit, some of these solos are from skilled players, but they all sound so forced and out of place, like the band has gone “right, solo here and here and here” and then played some random string of notes. Take the track “Erised”, which is one of the quieter ones (therefore the best), but both solos here just sound so unnatural and forced, especially the first one, coming straight out of a rather nice verse. The solos don’t hold a melody or idea for their duration, they just play seemingly random notes in a random order. As much as I hate to praise someone like John Petrucci, at least his solo starts out well. Those first two or three arpeggios fit perfectly in with the music (although I’m not sure any of the last two minutes of “Erised” are necessary at all), but of course, being Petrucci, it dissolves into mindless wank within a few seconds.

But it’s thoroughly impressive how Spencer and his incredible knack for an excellent hook keeps this album afloat so long. I’ll be listening to a track, thinking “man, this one’s pretty bad, I’ll probably skip this next time”, but partway through, Spencer just hits a groove and sings something so absolutely scrumptious that I have to go back and replay it. Take a song like “Have A Blast”. The violin part at the intro is alright, but it quickly dissolves into some pretty hefty wank-core, and aside from a couple of nifty parts from Halpern (his sudden blast beat part is great), it’s a pretty dismal track. But then…

“…and it’s the thrill of life that enables us to grow. Locked in the spirit’s line, souls entwine to journey on as one.”

And then suddenly it’s incredible. I’ve regularly used “Have A Blast” as an example of a track that goes from absolute trash to beauty within seconds. And it’s not just the vocal line, during that segment I actually think the guitars finally fit with the vocals and the tone, creating a beautiful segment with a spine-chillingly good vocal melody.

But it’s not a single moment. The number of times this happens during This Time It’s Personal is ridiculous, nearly every song has some moment that redeems it from mediocrity, all of them from Spencer. The only real tracks that fail to have any moments I enjoy would be “Make Total Destroy” and the last four tracks, which I will usually pass on when giving this album a spin. I can honestly say that the only tracks I enjoy right the way through would be “Muramasa”, “Scarlet” and “Erised”, when Spencer is given enough front time to make a difference for the whole track. The melody from “Muramasa” is absolutely brilliant, and the thing that made me look into this album when the trailer was released (I didn’t expect much after the debut), but both the times it is reprised, in “Ragnarok” and “Masamune”, it feels weak and forced, and doesn’t even save those tracks from mediocrity.

“Facepalm Mute” would probably be the worst track here, messier and more metalcore than everything else, but then the chorus hits, and “NEGLECT A SENSE OF IGNORANCE TO ALLTEEEER LIEEEEEESS” and suddenly it’s fantastic. The hooks on this album are possibly the best I’ve heard in years.

“We are the dark, that feed upon the living in sooolid shadoooooawwwww”

“…if you love the guilt then let it die, a life left so clean. We’ll measure the price of misery”

“It’s noooot for meee to saywhatyouneedtobelieeeeve”

“SCARRRLEEEEEEEAAAAAAAATTTT”

This Time It’s Personal is a record I love for basically the opposite of the reasons its fans love it, and I know that full well. I can see what the haters are saying, this is pretty bad, but I just can’t say no to those hooks.

6.7

Originally written for my Facebook page/blog: www.facebook.com/neoprogisbestprog