ALBUM REVIEW: Waving At The Sky – AVKRVST

With their debut record, The Approbation, AVKRVST quickly made a name for themselves in the modern progressive rock scene. The brainchild of childhood friends Simon Bergseth and Martin Utby, the Norwegian five-piece are as indebted to the classic prog of KING CRIMSON as to the heavier prog-metal of 90s DREAM THEATER. Almost exactly two years later, the band return with Waving At The Sky – an attempt to revisit and build upon the success of their debut.

Waving At The Sky begins with an instrumental statement of intent. Preceding moves through the gears you would expect from a concept album overture, showcasing the band’s three main modes. An opening of washy synths and RUSH-like octave stabs yields to a muscular bass riff, the palm-muted guitars playing as a prog-metal counterpoint. Its middle section opens into the band’s other main lane – clean arpeggiated guitars creating space, Bergseth‘s solo guitar line indulgently playing across the top. Finally, Utby‘s pounding drums combine with heavy diminished guitar lines, disturbing voice clips and stabs of organ – AVKRVST at their heaviest.

The momentum doesn’t slow for single The Trauma, staying in an instrumental lane indebted to early 2000’s OPETH in its double-kick drums and ascending, harmonically discordant guitar riffs. There isn’t a lot of showy virtuosity on offer, but the riff work is never phoned in, cleverly shaping atmospheres of menace or nostalgia as thematically required. The vocals are finally introduced about halfway through the song, Bergseth‘s voice stretching out each syllable but not reducing the sharpness of the writing or the instrumentation. Its closing moments go even heavier, deploying some growls to up the ante.

This sophomore effort serves as a prelude to The Approbation, which focused on an isolated man alone in a cabin slowly losing his mind. Waving At The Sky goes darker, drawing inspiration from the real-life events of a child abuse case over a decade ago, conducted by two neighbouring families. This context lends an edge to the slower-paced Families Are Forever, bathed throughout in a sinister haze. The slower pace of this and the folk-tinged Conflating Memories saps some of the album’s energy, however. The clean vocal style is often one-note in delivery, with single syllables drawn out over the music, not quite at the high standards of the instrumentation. The extended solos on keyboard or guitar are a hallmark of the genre and executed well here, but across these two songs they feel repetitive, lacking some spice.

First single The Malevolent immediately makes amends. It’s heavier and faster, a memorable horror-movie riff accented with stabs of organ. The band bring in Ross Jennings from HAKEN on guest vocals here, a shrewd move. His extended high vocal range brilliantly elevates the clever chords and melody of the chorus, a far cry from the efforts elsewhere on the album. It’s a hook-laden delight throughout, and over far too soon.

As dark as Waving At The Sky may be, when AVKRVST are in free-flowing riff mode, it’s also a great deal of fun, not least in Ghosts Of Yesteryear. The heavier sections avoid the polyrhythmic djent that PERIPHERY and others have normalised in the genre, drawing more from 2000s PORCUPINE TREE. There’s a push-pull between this and the green-fields imagery of woodwind, strummed guitars and vocals; very much the two halves of the AVKRVST sound.

The album closes with the 12-minute title track, a meandering affair cut from the same cloth as the rest of the album. There’s a return to the dark spoken word sections ripped from contemporary news broadcasts, but also a note of optimism in its closing moments. Despite the bleakness of the album’s concept and creation (written and recorded, like their debut, in an isolated cabin in remote Alvdal, Norway), it’s clearly the product of the band’s creative force, friends since childhood, delighted to be creating the style of music they love.

AVKRVST show on Waving At The Sky that the grand tradition of the progressive rock concept album is far from dead. There aren’t many risks taken here – the sound is indebted to its forebears, and for new or casual fans of prog-metal or rock there isn’t a great deal of new ground to point to; though The Malevolent stands out as a brilliant single. But longtime neo-prog fans will find plenty to appreciate here in the album’s lush instrumentation and joyous affection for the genre.

Rating: 7/10

Waving At the Sky is set for release on June 13th via InsideOut Music.

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