CLOUDKICKER — The Discovery (review)

CLOUDKICKER — The Discovery album cover Album · 2008 · Progressive Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
topofsm
The modern "djent" scene is filled with bands that take Meshuggah-riffs and water them down into weak -core influenced fake metal. While the polymetric riffs inherently take skill to play, these bands use these when these style riffs have become a popular trend. They turn the riffs into catchy riffs, rather than expanding upon them and progressing into new ideas.

Cloudkicker takes these Meshuggah riffs into the next logical progression. While albums like Nothing and I contained spacy, evil riffs, The Discovery is filled with cool washes of atmosphere. This instrumental work is something different in the djent scene, truly a breath of fresh air.

The Discovery is an instrumental album, featuring sufficiently heavy guitars with a melodic tone, while guitar chords drone in the background. True to the djent style the drums play basic cymbal and snare while the bass drums back up the guitar rhythms. Occasionally there will be a clean interlude.

On this album, even though most of the tracks are excellent, they mostly seem to flow into each other, not in the sense of Dark Side of the Moon. Rather, each song develops the atmosphere of the album in a different way. The opening alarm of "Genesis Device" starts the drums and bass pouring down with beautiful atmospheric guitar chords. This goes directly into "Dysphoria", where the chords ring triumphantly in an off time rhythm. This leads into "Avalanche", where the triplet rhythm gives these riffs an extra drive. It then cools down with "Everything's Mirrors", which is a quiet drum track laden interlude.

While none of the tracks are particularly masterful in and of themselves, they all seem to work more or less. While "Avalanche" seems to be terribly similar to the previous track and the title track does seem to go on too long, most of them work for what they need to do. The riffs do tend to repeat a bit excessively, but that is for the sake of building atmosphere.

All in all, The Discovery is an excellent modern work. There is no excuse for a metalhead to not listen to it as it is available on the Cloudkicker site for free. Kudos to Ben Sharp, guitarist, programmer, and producer of all the music on the album. An excellent listen.
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