AN NCS DEMO PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): RINTRAH

Trust me, writing about metal isn’t easy. The challenge of not using the same clichéd words over and over again in an effort to describe the music is daunting. That challenge is part of what keeps those of us at this place still engaged after so many years, i.e., we’re stubborn fools who strive to become better.

But trust me again, writing about metal in most of its kaleidoscopic shapes is a piece of cake compared to writing about the music of Rintrah, which is like a vine of many colors whose scandent twining runners have hooked into metal but whose roots and other branchings take their nourishment from far different sources of which we can claim no expertise and have little experience.

In other words, prepare for something completely different.

In its overarching conception, Rintrah is (to use their own words) “a new project that pays tribute to Romantic period art, poetry, and music (circa 1798-1837)”. The lyrics to the songs in their debut demo, for example, “are classical pieces by Romantic era poets, presented unaltered and unabridged”, two of them poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley and one by Charlotte Smith.

Even more notably, they tell us this:

“The songs are composed with motifs inspired by this period, but with contemporary influences. The guitar parts are recorded on an acoustic classical guitar, which has been given some distortion treatment. Bass guitar underpins the compositions, which are driven forward by drums that are at home within the metal world. The vocals are done by two singers, alternating between solo and harmonized lines.”

And the vocalists aren’t growling, snarling, or shrieking. They are singing.

Apart from what’s mentioned in that quotation, the participants in Rintrah are another part of what makes their music “metal adjacent”. The band consists of Otrebor from Botanist (and ex-Lotus Thief) on drums and vocals, Arsenio Santos (Howling Sycamore) on bass, and Billy DuPlain (aka Cynoxylon, ex-Botanist) on vocals, and the guitars were composed and recorded by classical musician Justin Collins, who was once a writer for Metal Bandcamp.

The demo’s opener takes as its text that poem by Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), a harrowing and viscerally gripping sonnet you can peruse at your leisure here. It imagines a “solitary wretch” who hies to a tall ocean-bordering cliff “in moody sadness, on the giddy brink.” The author wrote:

I see him more with envy than with fear;
He has no nice felicities that shrink
From giant horrors; wildly wandering here,
He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know
The depth or the duration of his woe.

The music itself channels a kind of beguiling but simultaneously unsettling giddiness. The drums hammer with a lively jump. The bass vividly throbs and thrusts. The forward momentum is potent. But the guitar strings ping and ripple, meandering and musing, somewhat warped and tripping along the edge; their brightness is almost hallucinatory, like a charm, but they also seem to become confused and even distraught.

The vocals, sometimes solo and sometimes harmonized, are also central to the song’s unsettling effects. They fervently wail and signal dark and distraught moods.

The demo’s second piece, “Ozymandias”, claims the words from what might be Shelley‘s most famous poem, one that addresses the evanescence of power and fame, and the ruins that time makes of even the greatest achievements.

The music here is perhaps even more ravishing and multi-faceted in its enthralling maneuvers than in the first track. The propulsive grooves shift gears; the elegant but unpredictable fretwork is spellbinding, but again takes some dark turns; and the high-flown singing is again emotionally powerful.

The demo concludes with “Mutability”, based upon another Shelley poem. It’s both a dark meditation and a hopeful one. These are the last two stanzas:

We rest—a dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise—one wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep,
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:—

It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free;
Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.

This final song is the slowest, most introspective, and moodiest of the three. The high, quavering voices are beautiful but forlorn. The bass hums its accompaniment. The drums thump and crack. The guitar pings like chimes slowly swinging in the wind, like a wistful mind swinging in its memories, and sparkles with sudden, unbidden insights.

We’re happy to say that Rintrah are working on a full album. But they ought to be encouraged to complete it, and the best way to increase the odds of that is to yell about this demo (along with us) to whomever will listen.