ROLO TOMASSI

But metal mixed with dream pop? Now that is a combo pack that i couldn't quite believe exists until i set my ears to this bizarre mishmash of opposing forces. Turns out this is a rather new development in the metal universe with Boris having released an archival drone metal dream pop album in 2021 and Sun Addicted Family mixing dream pop with blackgaze in 2020, but dream pop with mathcore? WTF?!!!! Well after listening to ROLO TOMASSI's seventh full-length release WHERE MYTH BECOMES MEMORY, it's not quite as inventive as i had hoped but still a decent listen.

ROLO TOMASSI features the lovely Eva Korman as lead vocalist and can she ever display her Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde mood swings the drop of a hat by sweetly singing dreamy pop melodies in the vein of The Cranberries before lashing out the most wicked screams in full fury mathcore mode. Her chameleonesque powers of completely taking you from one extreme to the other are the highlights of WHERE MYTH BECOMES MEMORY which features ten average length tracks that add up to 48 minutes. It's truly a bizarre choice of styles and almost sounds like two completely different bands simply taking turns, as if Beachhouse had joined forces with Cult of Luna and The Dillinger Escape Plan.

The album opens with serene dream pop track "Almost Ways" but becomes accompanied by quickened guitar chunks to provide a most surreal effect that could possible be called nightmare pop. The following "Cloaked" kicks into full mathcore mode with Eva's complete transformation from sweet girl to raging bitch on the rampage! It soon becomes obvious that this band hadn't really married the dream pop and mathcore elements at all and the gist of the album is to merely present one track with dream pop meets post-metal and then another in full mathcore fury. That is mostly true as tracks like "Prescience" actually work quite well in blending all the elements into a cohesive whole but by this time i feel like i've listened to an iTunes playlist rather than a continuous album flow.

No doubt ROLO TOMASSI has latched onto something with the disparate worlds of dream pop and mathcore duking it out in the same arena on WHERE MYTH BECOMES MEMORY but in the end it doesn't seem like this cake is fully baked. While i love both dream pop and mathcore, in this situation they just don't really work out together and the overall effect is like putting jalapeños on your ice cream, an interesting idea in theory but one that has its limited appeal. Nice try but i find this album more irritating than captivating. The dream pop melodies are sweet enough and the mathcore outbursts aren't mathy enough. Everything feels watered down in an attempt to force two opposite musical forces into the same cage. Not a horrible album because some of the moments work quite well but just not as brilliantly crafted as i was expecting.

It's been a real pleasure to follow Rolo Tomassi over the years. It's been a decade since I first heard Astraea, right in the middle of the period where I was convinced that mathcore was a worthless genre, and since then they've done nothing but grow in creative ways. You could hear it back then, what was coming - how else were they album to sell mathcore to someone who can't stand the style? And so it's no surprise that they move into softer pastures with an incredibly refined compositional sense - this isn't your regular heavy-band-goes-soft routine.

I can't say that I think this is a masterpiece, but it's certainly a very creative album and fuses elements of genres that have never really been pushed together. Dream pop, black metal, post-hardcore, progressive rock, ambient, it's all here. Eva Spence sounds as confident making demonic hell sounds as she does under a post-rock delay guitar progression. And the use of dynamics is excellent, a skill that is absolutely necessary if you're going to try the heavy-meets-soft album. They still have some room to grow in terms of the musical ideas, but I feel like this is a band with a very high ceiling, and we could see an era-defining album from them still to come.

7.9 (5th listen)

Part of my listening diary from my facebook music blog - www.facebook.com/TheExoskeletalJunction

While the main chug of the music is very brutal and hectic, it is balanced perfectly with more dreamy soundscapes. Overall, the heavier side of the music is dominated by delicious female grunting/screaming and crazy abstract shredding by the guitarist. The more athmospheric side is usually taken care of by the keyboard player. The whole album feel is definately very experimental.

Songs of special mention for me are: Oh, Hello Ghost, I Love Turbulence, Macabre Charade and Fantasia.