Vicinity
Recurrence

This band is from my vicinity, Scandinavia and this album is a recurrence. The clever ideas keeps coming when it comes to these Norwegians, and so does the progressive clichés with all tracks being needlessly long and things like that. It is the second album of these guys, the first one was called Awakening and it was released in 2013. This new Recurrence has six tracks and sixty-seven minutes playing time, half of the tracks is over ten minutes and one lasts for over twenty minutes, kind of like you could expect from a progressive band, or a band who is called progressive by its label even though their music isn’t very progressive. Once music like this was progressive but not now.

Melodic and a little bit complex metal, with long tracks and some other clichés – no surprises and nothing that will progress the musical style forward. Pretty average production and vocals; there is nothing that really stands out in terms of style when it comes to this album. Think bands like Circus Maximus or perhaps Threshold if you want a reference through namedropping. The album is quite long with long tracks where the ending is over twenty minutes long – that is what I call a progressive cliché even though the music often called progressive hardly can be described as progressive anymore.

I think they have put together a good solid album here; Recurrence is certainly good enough to give a go. But it isn’t an album that will really grab your attention, it is nice to listen to it but you find that when it has ended you don’t really recall any of what you have heard. A kind of forgetful album in many ways and I think that it doesn’t have enough dynamics to really last for the entire playing time. I find that I sort of half-listen to this album not really paying attention to what is coming through the speakers, these Norwegians don’t really have that special thing that can be heard in albums from the likes of Dream Theater or Fates Warning.

And rarely does a band pull off a ten-minute song, let alone a twenty-minute one. This band doesn’t quite manage any of their long songs, they are not epic or exciting, just long and the longest one is just way too long. Their best tracks are the shorter and the best one is the shortest, Extinction is the name of that track and though it is a good track it isn’t really a standout track. This album feels like a solid effort but also like a recurrence, like “haven’t I heard this before?”

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