Tired of searching that progressive metal tag on Bandcamp and finding a djent in your soup? Well, here is some progressive metal for you. It is also djent. But actually progressive! Notochord are an odd ensemble that contains past members of The Contortionist, which I can clearly hear in both the atmospheric parts of Aegis and also in the metal parts. They bill themselves as post metal and I can see why as this album (or 22 minute EP?) changes shape often. Crashing and creeping post metal is aided by the guitar tone and sound of the djent style. Listening to Aegis though, you might find it to be a weird trip because it plays around with a lot of ambient instrumental moments. This actually seems to be the real character of the album since the metal and the spaced out parts often intersect. Some cool moments are to be found in “Abyssal Ontogeny”, where the bass heavy sound is backed up by some dissonant chords producing a kind of fusion of genres that has me intrigued. In songs like “Xylem”, it’s easy to spot The Contortionist heritage as well, with the drawn out chords, and light clean singing with walking bass in the background.
But most of Aegis, despite interesting in part, leaves me cold. “Indelible” opens the album at five minutes, with three of those spent on atmosphere as the song just kind of repeats and trails off. Those are the memorable parts of the album; a lot of the metal often doesn’t have time to fully develop as Notochord spend the shorter songs on atmospherics. The meat of the songs ends up being nonsensical and leaves no sort of statement behind. The worst of these tendencies show up in “Microbial”, which sounds like three different instrumentals stitched together, going form tense to different shades of floaty prog. It’s not so much that I don’t appreciate the range of experimentation here but it feels very random and unfinished – like the prototype of a sound that could have used more work before landing as a collection of songs. I struggle to remember much of Aegis after I hear it and that’s a shame because some of its parts could be compelling if put together in a better way. In the end I got my progressive metal and still felt like I’d been tricked!
