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.

Kingcrimsonprog Of all the Djent bands, Periphery are undoubtedly the biggest and most well known. Since 2005 they have been innovators boldly carving their own path through progressive and tech Metal styles, inspiring many in their wake.

Taking influences from mathy bands like Dillinger Escape Plan and Sikth, harder bands like the ferocious Messugah, the crushing parts from Iowa-era Slipknot, as well as taking the flowing guitar solo techniques from the likes of Dream Theater and mashing it together with the general sounds and clean/heavy dynamics of modern metalcore bands, putting that over the top of the bounce from the heavier Nu Metal bands and even peppering it with electronic and ambient bits that wouldn't feel out of place on a Nine Inch Nails record, the band manage to meld all these disparate styles into one cohesive and entertaining whole.

I know some people get uppity about anyone using the word 'Djent' and argue its either not a real subgenre and its just Prog Metal or else its just a lot of people copying Messugah but both of those sentiments are reductive and inaccurate and time has shown this to be a legitimate and true subgenre (just look at the number of bands who do it now, or the amount a websites devoted to it). You know; In the same way Doom is a real subgenre and not just a load of people copying Black Sabbath and that Power Metal is not just Traditional Heavy Metal.

If you like bands like Tesseract and want something heavier, if you like bands like Monuments and want something catchier, if you like bands like Uneven Structure and want something bouncier, you also really need to check out Periphery. If you like Periphery, this is a particualrly must-have album and not one to pass over or miss out on.

Periphery III Select Difficulty, is, confusingly, Periphery's fifth studio album (due to the Juggernaut Alpha & Omega albums which preceded it not being numbered). It was self produced and released in 2016. The music is a great mix of complicated awkward rhythms, soaring commercial choruses and spicing it up with shimmering guitar lines and the odd bits of electronics here and there. You get some great moments like clean singing over blast beats. There's violins and trumpets and choirs too. Its probably their most diverse album overall.

There are a few awesome heavier tracks like 'The Price Is Wrong,' 'Motormouth' and 'Habitual Line-Stepper.' The band also try stretching their wings a little bit. There are a few newer ideas and more quiet moments, like the superb closer 'Lune' with its beautiful backing vocals, or the catchy and commercial 'Flatline' which could be on the radio as well as the Faith No More influenced 'Reamain Indoors.' There's some great lyrics too. I've worked a lot in hospital and held a lot of people's hands as they die in front of me, and the lyrics to Flat Line are pretty affecting. I particularly like the hook 'He says send an angel to pull me from the hell below. This weight is far too much to own and this body doesn’t feel like home.'

I feel like maybe Periphery II This Time Its Personal is probably their best album overall for sheer impact and creativity at the time, and for how it broke them to a bigger audience, but for me this is a damn close second and their most cohesive and listen-to-on-repeat album to date. I like to leave this album on in the car and just play it end to end, over and over again. There isn't one song on this I wouldn't want to hear live and there are a lot on here that demands to be in compilations and play lists.

I also feel like this is also a great introduction point for people who don't know the band or the subgenre. If you like A Perfect Circle or Cog or Rishloo 'Lune' is really likely to hit you. If you like Slipknot when they go a bit Morbid Angel influenced 'Habitual Line Stepper' is worth checking out. I  even feel like fans of Nu Metal and Rap Metal bands like Incubus and P.O.D and (Hed) PE might even get in on the bouncy bass driven 'Catch Fire.'

Overall, this album is pretty superb and deserves to be heard by more people. If you like any of the bands or ideas I've mentioned above, take a shot and give it a listen. I doubt you'll regret it.

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 Clear is a 2014 EP by the American Progressive Metal band Periphery, released between their second and third full-length albums.

The twenty-nine minute EP features seven individual compositions, each creatively directed by a separate person, each of which contain themes presented within the opening track, ‘Overture.’

If you sit there and pick it apart you can appreciate all the nice progressive touches and experimentation, equally if you like you can just take it all at face value, as another set of top-quality Periphery songs. For only containing seven tracks, there’s quite a bit of variety to be found on Clear; there’s a piano driven intro, there are two instrumentals, some catchy-single sounding material, some heavy Djenty rhythms, some nice effects-laiden guitars and some electronic ambient stuff all in there. That being said, it isn’t a sloppy mish mash of different styles and it isn’t so experimental that it looses listenability, this is a very solid collection of great sounding tracks that all sound like Periphery.

Highlights include the catchy ‘Parade Of Ashes,’ as well as ‘Feed The Ground’ and the instrumental ‘Zero.’

Overall; Clear is a fine addition to any Periphery fan’s collection. I’d also recommend anyone who listens to Protest The Hero, Tesseract, The Safety Fire, Animals As Leaders, Monuments, Circles, Coheed & Cambria and Karnivool give it a shot too. This is a nice introduction to the band, covering sounds found from both their debut and sophomore albums, and with enough variety and personality to really sell what the band are about.

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