The Indian metal band Ec{c}entric Pendulum send all sorts of signals about the nature of their music before you hear a single note. Their name of course, which kindles images of a swinging thing that doesn’t swing like you expect it will, and the quirky typography they use in spelling it. And then there’s the title of their forthcoming second album — Perspectiva Invertalis — a Latin phrase which means “inverted perspective”.
And then there’s that cover art up above by Sam Ektoplasm, which is (to put it mildly) out of the ordinary for a metal band (or any band).
Undoubtedly some of you are aware of what Ec{c}entric Pendulum do with their music, because they do have a previous album (Winding the Optics) to their credit, and they’ve played at Wacken Open Air in Germany (the first band to represent India there), and shared stages in both Europe and India with the likes of Opeth, Textures, Meshuggah, Kreator, Orphaned Land, and recently Suffocation.
But it’s been more than a dozen years since that first album was released, and nearly seven years since their Tellurian Concepts EP, and so even if you’ve heard what they’ve done in the past, it’s best to now listen with fresh ears to what they’ve accomplished on this new album, which will be released tomorrow via Subcontinental Records.
Not surprisingly, given the passage of so much time, the band’s lineup has changed. Perspectiva Invertalis features the return of one of the original members, guitar player Ashish Kumar, alongside founding member Arun Natarajan (guitars, bass, vocals) and guitarists Arjun Mulky and Ankit Suryakanth.
The new album also includes the work of French drummer extraordinaire Kevin Paradis, who also mixed and mastered the album, and one of the songs (“In Pretence”) includes a performance by Hannes Grossmann.
Before we get to the music we should also share this about the songs’ subject matter:
Lyrical themes deal with human inadequacies, greed, and other negative qualities that speak about the turmoil that goes on between mankind, between different races.
It also has a primitive time line, not reflecting the human behavior in the 20th century but more so in the 16th or 17th century, their pursuit of gold, land, women, pleasure, beauty and other materialistic pleasures.
It talks about the shortsightedness that leads to the ultimate chaos and downfall of everything created. Hence delivering a completed inverted perspective of whats good and whats evil!
If you were paying attention earlier, you’ll already realize that the new album features the work of four guitarists — four! And the songwriting makes a place for all of them, in addition to the fascinating eccentricities of the bass and the lights-out percussive work by Kevin Paradis.
This is, in short, completely head-spinning music. To be clear, it’s unmistakably ferocious and barbarously wild, with plenty of headlong savagery in the malicious growls, howls, and screams in the vocal department, as well as in the frequently disemboweling quality of the riffage and the full-bore obliteration of the drum assaults.
And that’s a big part of what makes the album such a startling success: Its extravagant multitude of mercurial maneuvers will spin your head all the way around, but without sacrificing the aggressiveness of death metal or the thrash-powered wildness of the music.
Equally critical to the album’s success is the carefully planned ingenuity of the songwriting. Yes, the music is dazzling, even bamboozling, in its intricacy and its multitude of high-speed twists and turns, and the technical skill of the performers is top-shelf. But this isn’t a self-indulgent flurry of noodling or an indecipherable cavalcade of technical fireworks for its own sake.
Instead, the songs have structure. The many motifs hang together, recurring in ways that keep grabbing the listener. There are hammering grooves, even though they come fast and furiously, and the music rhythmically blares and blazes as often as it spins off into stratospheric levels of exultation and delirium.
One other point well worth noting is the presence of gleaming multi-guitar solos, which often begin like fluid sorcery and then spiral up into fire. And the soloing is melodic and conducive to the changing moods of the songs — again, not some kind of technical show-off for its own sake.
And finally, we should give a round of applause to the way the music was produced and mixed. This is most definitely the kind of album that should provide clarity and evenness, because there are so many moving parts each of which is so well worth hearing as they rapidly diverge and converge across the channels.
There’s not much room for easy breathing as this kaleidoscope of sound spins. For the most part, Ec{c}entric Pendulum stay in the fast lane (with a few well-situated digressions into slower and dreamier phases, most prominently in the album’s closing track). And for that reason it’s probably a good thing that the album reaches its finish line in about 37 minutes, long enough to leave you gasping but not long enough to leave you prone with your eyes rolled back in your head.
But trust me, there’s nothing about the album that will make you numb to its extraordinary sensations. This extravaganza of prog/death/thrash is too relentlessly fascinating for that. Find out for yourselves:
EC{C}ENTRIC PENDULUM is:
Arun Natarajan – Guitars, Bass, Vocals
Arjun Mulky – Guitars
Ashish Prasanna Kumar – Guitars
Ankit Suryakanth – Lead Guitars
Kevin Paradis – Drums (session)
The album comes recommended for fans of Nevermore, Cynic, Death, Opeth, and BTBAM. It will be released on vinyl LP, digipack CD, and digital formats, and you can take advantage of another Bandcamp Friday to order it tomorrow.
PRE-ORDER:
https://eccentricpendulum.bandcamp.com/album/perspectiva-invertalis
EC{C}ENTRIC PENDULUM:
https://www.instagram.com/eccentric_pendulum/
https://www.facebook.com/EccentricPendulum1/