ALBUM REVIEW: Crush The Wise Me Who Refuse To Submit – The Progerians
The modern world can be a dismal place in which to exist. The frustrations and anxieties that come with living in a world fraught with environmental collapse, political upheavals, a growing rich-poor divide and the rise of neo-fascism are only growing, and whilst it’s one hell of a cliche to say that out of such hardship springs great art, you’d be remiss to ignore that the rising tide of fear and hatred hasn’t been reflected in a wide range of fantastic new metal releases. Born amidst fears of unemployment, modernity and lack of future, the second full-length from the Belgian band THE PROGERIANS, formerly THE FABULOUS PROGERIANS and THE MIGHTY PROGERIANS, is yet another release to add to this growing list.
As BODY VOID, MOLOCH and a host more have exemplified in recent months, sludge has always been a genre that excels at capturing the state of a troubled mind. THE PROGERIANS make good use of that side of the genre here, but the quartet are less about heads-down brutality than their sludgy peers, boasting a sound that’s expansive and exploratory, a feature that helps Crush The Wise Men Who Refuse To Submit’s hour-long run-time fly by. In fact, though their sound is both rough and tough, it’s oddly elegant in the way that these lengthy compositions unravel before you.
For vast swathes of the album, Crush The Wise Men… is a coming together of noise rock and sludge, the former being particularly evident in the vocals, which are shared between guitarist Fabe, bassist Piotr and drummer Thomas. They aren’t the anguished cries of some sludge nor the dramatic highs of some traditional doom, largely coming in the form of melodic croons or the sort of unsettling, nearly-spoken word rasps that noise rock bands often champion.
This merging of sludge and noise rock is a collaboration that has been wielded successfully before by the likes of DYSTOPIA and, more recently, PASCAGOULA, but here the union is less about creating grimy and disconcerting atmospheres (though those are very much part of the package) and more about crafting vast exploratory epics, with touches of psychedelia and even post-rock occasionally rearing their head. THE PROGERIANS experiment with confidence here, bringing disparate inspirations together and thus largely succeeding in expanding their sound into interesting new realms. When bringing the punk elements to the fore, for instance, they remind of NOISEPICKER in their ability to retain their dirgy doom cred in the process.
Such experimentation is odd to behold, the album operating in a realm that aims to capture the impressive variety and ambitious scope of the music as well as its potency. The production seems more focused on the former, meaning that you’d be hesitant to call anything here truly brutal, but Crush The Wise Men… does not hold back in order to progress, in fact it uses those progressions as new ways of attack – it’s raw, rough and heavy not in spite of its experimental streak, but because of it. The impact of the spiky grooves on Nitjeret, for example, are certainly bolstered by the way they burst out of the gate after the churning riffs of Graven, and the way this is then followed by the slow-burning psychedelia of Your Manifest exemplifies how you can never be fully sure what to expect next.
THE PROGERIANS might confront some gloomy topics with their music, but their latest album is a delight for any metal fan sick to death of one-note doom. Emerging from a strong and varied Belgian scene that has gifted us the likes of AMENRA, SLOW CRUSH and BRUTUS, the quartet may no longer be fabulous or mighty in name, but musically, they are still both.
Rating: 8/10
Crush The Wise Men Who Refuse To Submit is set for release May 24th via Mottow Soundz.
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