RISE RADIANT

With their fifth album, Rise Radiant, Caligula's Horse follow the recent trend of a few other prog metal bands of mixing their trademark heavy sound (in this case, a djenty form of prog metal) with more mainstream pop/rock sensibilities. Leprous, with their 2019 album Pitfalls, is an obvious example, but also Haken with 2020's Virus tread a similar path. Needless to say, this development did not sit well with some of the fans of these bands. But I am not one of those: I did love both albums (Pitfalls being my Album of the Year for 2019), so in principle Rise Radiant fell on very welcoming ears. Unfortunately, however, this album did not fully 'click' with me, as I felt that it is a bit of a hit and miss, with only a few songs reaching the spectacular levels of the band's previous output.

Let's start with the good news. Caligula's Horse have always delivered their healthy dose of prog workouts on their albums, and Rise Radiant is no exception. 'Salt' and the two interconnected closing tracks, 'Autumn' and 'The Ascent' (the best song of the album), offer musical tour-de-forces that will please long-time fans of the band. All sonic trademarks of the band are on display here. While not reaching the complexity of songs from the band's previous album In Contact, the structure of these three songs is sufficiently intricate to keep things unpredictable and interesting. There is a strong emphasis on dynamics (here as on the rest of the album), with a continuous alternation between stripped-down, quiet parts and djenty, rhythmically complex sections. But even at their heaviest, Caligula's Horse never lose sight of melody as Jim Grey's melancholic but strangely uplifting vocal melodies, often sung in falsetto to increase the emotional punch, take centre stage in the mix. These songs are not too different from what the band has offered on previous albums, except for a general toning-down of aggression in the music and a heightened attention to keeping the melodies simple and catchy.

Elsewhere on the album, Caligula's Horse take more decisive steps towards their new sonic identity. The song structure is vastly simplified on tracks like 'The Tempest', 'Slow Violence', 'Oceanrise' and 'Valkyrie', which largely stick to the verse/chorus/middle-eight/chorus sequence of mainstream pop/rock. The arrangements are also kept quite simple and linear, with variations mostly consisting of a thickening of the sound in the repetitions of the verse. The verses are usually soft and dark, with Grey's relying heavily on his lower-register and the instruments quieting down to the point that often only acoustic guitars or the bass are left to provide an harmonic counterpart to Grey's croons. This creates a stark contrast with the choruses, which are instead fuller, heavier and uplifting. It's all very well-done and perfectly geared up to create maximum cathartic effect, which makes these songs very easy to like on first listen.

And this is where the bad news start. While songs like 'Slow Violence', 'Oceanrise' or 'Valkyrie' make an immediate impression, it unfortunately does not last, as the simplified structure makes the songs quite predictable and, in the long-run, uninteresting. What's more, the fact that these songs are all cut from the same cloth in terms of structure and dynamics leaves me with the feeling that the album lacks variation and is too monotonous. In addition, although the melodies are catchy and hummable, they are often not terribly interesting and tend to slip out of my mind not long after I have heard them. More generally, I feel that the album lacks moments that make my ears properly perk up. I can probably count these moments on the palm of one hand: 'The Tempest' (the best of the bunch of simpler songs) features a killer opening/closing riff, an interesting vocal phrasing on the verse and a gorgeous chorus; 'Salt' contains some beautiful vocal harmonies; and there is some exciting guitar and vocal work on 'The Ascent', particularly on the verse and the closing choral section. Not much else really stands out for me. This is a big difference compared to an album like In Contact, which was literally bursting with memorable, head-turning moments that made you want to put the record on again as soon as it finished.

And this is probably the biggest limit of Rise Radiant: while pleasant and well-produced, it is not a record that I can see myself turning to again and again, because I simply do not feel that it has the same long-lasting listening value of albums like In Contact or Bloom. I cannot help but draw a comparison between Caligula's Horse's new musical direction and the evolution of Leprous, the band that I find sonically closer to Caligula's Horse. While the Norwegians have managed to take the best qualities of pop music (accessible, memorable melodies; subtle and sophisticated arrangements) and merge them with the unpredictability and forward-looking attitude of prog, Caligula's Horse seem to have also borrowed from pop its less appealing qualities: predictability and lack of musical depth. I don't want this criticism to sound too negative, though, because Rise Radiant remains a very listenable album - just not as exciting or enthralling as I would have hoped the new Caligula's Horse album would be, especially after a heavy-weight like In Contact.