French instrumental metal band Stomb, featuring guitarists Aurelien De Freitas and Tom Bonetta, debuted with the four-song EP Fragment (2013).
The seven-minute Vision From A Synthetic Reality somehow manages to fuse catastrophic doom, minimalist repetition and cosmic prayer.
Morbid rhythm and guitar effects lighten up A Perspective Journey before the multi-guitar detonation.
Through The Memories is even pensive and lyrical.
The 28-minute six-song EP Duality (2017) offers even more atmospheric prog-metal.
The seven-minute The Dark Admirer escalates a bucolic motif to an anthemic crescendo.
The Red Way has a cosmic-psychedelic quality.
melodic tragic overtones We the Duality and
Contemplation Of The Cold is a spiritual vignette with
hip-hop beat and piano notes.
The Grey (2015) changed course, opting for a more brutal kind of prog-metal with mixed results.
The nine-minute The Complex comes through as rather confused and uninspiring, and the eight-minute Terminal City toys with found voices like an amateur thus undercutting the momentum of the melodic second half.
The eight-minute Veins Of Asphalt is better architected Meshuggah-inspired post-metal journey.
The New Coming and Rise From Nothing are cinematic vignettes
that emphasize the humane side of their metal sound.
Even the hysterical atonal Corrision Juncture
the distorted panzer-like eight-minute Genome Decline
boast lyrical moments.
the eight-minute Only An Echo
pop-metal, prog-metal or djent.
From Nihil (2020) stands as the definitive consacration
at the confluence of djent and doom.
The eight-minute Dimension Zero merges melodic quasi-folk motifs and distorted impetus with intermezzos of dissonant psychedelia, and ends in a
booming apotheosis (Tom Gadonna's drumming, already the driver of the piece's
shifting time signatures, steals the show in the ending).
Void Divine weaves space-rock melodic threads until the
horror intermezzo after which it turns into funk-metal carpet-bombing.
Electronic effects open the nine-minute Extrasensory, a
fantasia that keeps shifting mood, from
panzer-grade drumming with machine-gun effects to a
lyrical bucolic intermezzo and to demonic chaos
and to a grandiloquent synth riff over blastbeats
and to the final doom-y lullaby.
A suspense-filled synth melody opens the crescendo of the eight-minute The Hologram, one of the most coherent songs.
The seven-minute Embrace The Nihil transitions from a slow voodoo dance to a thundering doom-y mayhem.
These feel like metal-damaged heirs of 1970s prog-rock suites.
Romantic melodies surface even in the crushing Ephemeral
and in the epileptic Final Transmission.
Massive Disturbed Meta Art (Season of Mist, 2023) opens with Laure LePrunenec's operatic vocals launching the demonic pandemonium of The Realm Of Delerium.
The cosmic leitmotiv of much of their work is better appreciated in
Sidereal Lucid Dreamer, an elegant post-metal fantasia.
The eight-minute In The Eye Of Aghemahra begins in a dense atmosphere of suspense, with all the instruments (including electronics) piling up ominous sounds, and then plunges into an almost empty space, a space of distorted echoes, and finally a guitar melody emerges, although soon buried by relentless drumming and collective distortion.
The album explores several new directions.
The eight-minute Kaleidoscope indulges in asleepy lounge atmosphere barely interrupted by a minute of metal eruption.
Meta Art (one of the highlights) is a folk-jazzy detour pivoting around Jrgen Munkeby's romantic saxophone solos.
The Extantrasy is a dissonant electronic ballet, while, at the opposite end of the spectrum,
An Absence Of Sun embraces the dance beats and synth lines of synth-pop.
This all leads to the eight-minute closer, Transcendence, four minutes of
contemplative jamming interrupted by metal pomp and followed by a
skeletal, pulsing synth melody.
