Odds are that you haven't heard of Periphery, they are "A Band from Maryland, they like eating food and touring." As written by one of the band's guitarists, Jake Bowen on their last.fm bio.
Periphery play music called technical or "math metal" which essentially is rhythmically complex, guitar-based style of experimental rock music that emerged in the late 1980s. It is characterized by complex, atypical rhythmic structures (including irregular stopping and starting), angular melodies, and dissonant chords.
One of the most known bands by this musical style is a band called "Meshuggah". There's been a recent rise in math/technical metal with bands like Textures, Animals as Leaders (who recently released their debut album.) and Periphery.
Periphery is one of the few bands that's progress I've followed for a long time, listened to hundreds of their demo tracks posted during the years by Misha Mansoor (band's guitarist) under his alias Bulb to the internet. The band has gone through several vocalist changes, and most of their early recordings were instrumentals. Being that the songs were instrumentals, I could truly hear how skilled the band was, and how complex their music is. Ever since they started releasing their first vocalized demos, I feared that the unique sound they had so long been perfecting would be lost and overshadowed by the singing. Some of the songs like Insomnia and Zyglrox were some of the most heaviest, unsettling and awesome tracks I had ever heard.
One thing was obvious though, the songs were gonna have vocals, so the question was, could the band deliver the samekind of impact with them as they did without them?
The album starts with my alltime favorite Periphery song, before mentioned Insomnia, and my first reaction was that the sound wasn't as raw as in the demos, which is understandable, but for me it didn't sound that good. Also, like I had predicted, the singing, and growling, completely overshadowed some of the fine details in the playing that originally made the song so awesome, the build up and how it exploded and kept going in a fierce pace, I could no longer hear that same energy in it. Another thing that I noticed on many of the songs was that there were these scrambled technologic tiny noises on the background. I really don't see the point, in my opinion, it adds nothing to the music, and only complicates the overall sound.
Songs like Walk and Light I had grown used to with vocals as there had been many of versions of them in the past, and I liked them now aswell, and they were most part unchanged.
However, the song Letter Experiment which was my favorite vocal songs of Periphery before, had gone under drastic lyrical changes, among other things, which I wasn't quite fond of.
The song All New Materials was another track I liked without vocals, it was a more mellow songs than the others and was a nice bridge between the more heavy tracks, but now with the album version, the vocals absolutely kill it for me.
In conclusion, the album is more or less what you came to expect from Periphery, if you liked the demos, you're gonna like this, but honestly they should have left some of the songs as instrumentals as they were first heard, and leave the sound effects out of it and leave more of a raw quality to the songs.
After 11 tracks, the album finishes off with an epic 15 and half minute version of Racecar. A perfect way to end the album.
All in all, a very strong debut for a band I've loved for so long and will definitely score big in the future. What they have in store for us in the future, only time will tell.
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