Changeling reached my ears at a time when I really needed it yet couldn’t fully appreciate it. I find it hard to write about an album when it’s so uninteresting and conforming to norms that I have a hard time saying anything about it—that was never Changeling though. Or when I’m burned out on music listening. Or when an album is great yet stumps me because I don’t fully understand what it’s doing. Now, having had the time to fully digest Changeling and coming out of this my own burnout period, it remains as vivid as when I first heard it on its release. Changeling play a mix of technical and progressive death metal, but that is a reductive description considering the connotations of those two genres. Can you really say that someone does something new in music? That’s the wrong question here, as what Changeling have created on their debut album is something different from their peers.
A lot of people likely approach the release of Changeling‘s debut album with the information that it’s a project of virtuoso fretless guitar player Tom “Fountainhead” Geldschläger (NYN, guest with Ingurgitating Oblivion, ex-Obscura) and with all of the history of the controversy around the Obscura album he was a part of. Personally, I am not a fan of Obscura despite all the talent involved in that project, so I went into Changeling with few expectations. Initially starting out as a solo Fountainhead album, the band gathered around Geldschläger is no less impressive, consisting of Morean (Alkaloid, Dark Fortress) on vocals, Mike Heller on drums (Malignancy, ex-Fear Factory, session work for Sigh and Abigail Williams), and fretless bass player Arran McSporran (Virvum, Cosmitorium, ex-De Profundis).
If you’re anything like me, the 30 (!) guest musicians listed on Changeling‘s Bandcamp page should instantly feed you with bad flashbacks to listening to prog metal albums where the songs are rickety skeletons serving as vehicles for one skilled player’s solos after another. Not being big on music theory nor virtuosity, this kind of writing bores me to death and too often does this cranky Gator put on progressive music to find that the song is playing second fiddle to well… the fiddle. This is doubly true for the technical death metal genre, where fiddling is all it’s seemingly about. Somehow, Changeling avoids this pitfall because of Geldschläger‘s writing style of starting with the whole and trying to figure out what makes sense to the benefit of the songs. This is immediately clear in tracks like “World? What World?”, where the main theme of the song skips around different instruments and guest orchestration, always returning through all of the twists and turns in a way that recalls classical music as much as it does metal. Changeling is a varied album that is stylistically cohesive, yet morphs all of the time into something new because of solid thematic writing. “Falling in Circles” and “Abyss” make efforts to sound like their namesakes, the former revolving with a tense chorus that zig-zags panicked riffs with little resolve. The latter plays around with increased pitch in its choirs to create crashing waves of contrast with the song’s doom-like crawl and constantly pushes you down like a schoolyard bully trying to crush both body and spirit. Every song has a clear idea like this, with great attention to detail paid even to the two interludes, who are clearly intended to bridge the songs surrounding them rather than just to give you a pause. With Geldschläger handling the mixing and mastering on the album, every single performance is handled with care and every single aspect of the album aims towards cohesion.
Mentioning any single performance is hard, as there are so many great moments where all of the musicians, guest or not, get to shine. One that sticks out to me is the vocal performance of Florian Magnus Maier (Morean), as I was already a fan of his work with Alkaloid. It’s hard to tell if Changeling is a concept album or not, but themes like the fleeting aspect of consciousness, death and the nature of the universe are a red thread that I see as a loose narrative that binds the songs together despite their varied nature. Morean brings his A-game here, with his deep growls that recall David Vincent (Morbid Angel, Vltimas) and his clean vocals that are unlike anyone else in this genre. He brings a viciousness to the title track where, and some much needed feeling in calmer moments like in “Abdication” that really sells the music’s idiosyncratic nature. The screams of the newborn Changeling resonates throughout the whole.
In thinking about why Changeling has grabbed me so hard these last few months and not let go even now, one word keeps coming to mind: tension. This is embodied in the title track, which never lets go of your throat even as it breaks down to clean vocals, bass, and hand-played tabla drums. As a whole, Changeling is a particularly heavy album. The album has plenty of layers, like a lot of progressive metal albums, but it’s relentless in its sustained tension. Changeling create a kind of density in their songs that makes them hard to grasp at first, and leave you very little room to breathe in the long run. A lot of bands relying on dissonance as a crutch do this too, but where this band differs is that they raise this tension high along the melodies of the songs, creating moments that are easily identifiable yet rife with intricate content that refuses to let you go. I can see that it would be easy for people that listen to progressive metal to bounce off this album because of its relentless character, but it’s right up this Gator’s alley: extreme, yet extremely melodic. Even as the unwieldy “Anathema” builds towards its 16th minute like an antagonistic villain tirade about atheism and naturalism in a musical number, each moment leading up to its glitching, trilling out into space-soloing feels earned. It may not be anything entirely new, but it’s the kind of different I need in my music right now.
