STORM CORROSION

If you like the introspective parts of Porcupine Tree or the more laid back Opeth records such as the last one, the chances are high that you might also like the debut release of the finally fruitful collaboration between Opeth frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt and Porcupine Tree frontman Steven Wilson.

This record has though nothing to do with metal music and can rather be described as dark ambient music. From the beginning on, the band builds up a laid back but still somewhat eerie and even menacing atmosphere. The clean vocals always remain soft, the instrumental parts are mostly acoustic, sound rather ethereal and appear as a mixture of minor folk blends with loads of progressive rock influences from the seventies but there are still some haunting sound effects that keep the tension high. You mostly only hear the calm vocals, an acoustic guitar and some quite dark sound effects.

The band has though something very intriguing to offer in their song structures. Sometimes, the band works on a calm and hypnotizing melody and you suddenly have a change after several minutes into a song and you get drowned into a very apocalyptic atmosphere where you can also hear distorted electric guitars, hevaier drumming and a few pumping bass chords. These suprises happen to be quite efficient and they never last too long as the band always goes back to a calmer and rather peaceful mood. In other tracks, the band plays with wrong expectations. A song starts very calm but at the same time scary and uneasy and you expect a sudden sort of musical explosion, an agressive part, a passage of bleak darkness but this eventually never arrives or only when you expect it the least. Even after several tries of the record, this hypnotizing technique still works perfectly as you can't quite remember what exactly happened at which moment during your last discovery of the release.

This kind of music works best if you put your headphones on and lay down on a couch in a dark room. The overall tone of the record is quite dreamy, floating and progressive. At first try, one might think that the tracks are too slow and that there is not much going on but the more you listen to this stunning record again and again, the more you discover new tiny details and the more you get addicted by this record's unique atmosphere. I would describe the album's vibe as a mixture of bleak, depressive, natural, relaxed and transcendant parts.

The four first songs are stunning and precisely elaborated and you can always discover something new. The closing two tracks fall a little bit off the edge for me even if they aren't that bad. They just sound somewhat like more of the same and don't feel as unique as the first four tracks. They have less changes and some ideas sound quite similar to the first songs in here or to some older Opeth tracks.

In the end, this release here requests quite a lot of time and patience. If you are the kind of guy who usually listens to music while taking the bus, washing the dishes or chatting with friends, then this won't be your kind of record. This release is made for sentimental people who enjoy to pass a couple of calm hours on their own from time to time. Even though the lyrics are neither elaborated nor that intriguing, this release has a grippingly unique atmosphere and should grow on you as time passes by. This band is really big when they are minimalistic, they are really intense when they are most laid back and this kind of contradictoriness gives the album a charming soul. In the future, I would maybe even give this release a higher note as I give right now as there is a lot of potential in this.

Originally published on www.metal-archives.com on September 1st of the year 2012.