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OLD MACHINES "The Cycles of Extinction"
OLD MACHINES "The Cycles of Extinction"
By Dr. Abner Mality
Confession time: The Good Doctor is a huge fan of space opera science fiction. The grander the story and the bigger the scope, the more I'm drawn to it. If you're familiar with the works of SF authors like Asimov, Stephen Baxter, Peter Hamilton and Alistair Reynolds, you'll know the kind of story I'm talking about. These are the stories that cover galactic empires and which unfold over the space of millions, if not billions, of years. Well, now we have the metal soundtrack to these massive space operas. Enter: OLD MACHINES.
This took a while to hook me, but now I'm all the way in. This band contains former members of SKELETAL REMAINS, OXYGEN DESTROYER, SILVER TALON and more, but sounds very little like those bands. Those expecting pure death metal will be disappointed. Rather, OLD MACHINES perform a symphonic mix of black, power and death metal with a huge dose of spacey ambient synth injected into it. NOCTURNUS A.D. is somewhat of a comparison, but the MACHINES are much more pompous. If you remember the band BAL-SAGOTH, it's closer to that and also reminds me of LIMBONIC ART! Sprinkle in dashes of FEAR FACTORY as well as synth artists like KLAUS SCHULZE and even GARY NUMAN! Songs are long...sometimes too much so...and complex in structure.
As for the story being told, it is vast. Great destructive machines ruled by a god-like A.I. mind rise and fall over millions of years of galactic history, periodically rising to destroy organic life before going dormant again and repeating the cycle. The album tells the story of the Machine Gods first long wars with several galactic empires and ends with the rise of the latest...humans from Earth!
I won't go into detail on the songs...all of which have extremely long and rather pretentious titles...because there's just so much going on. There are long stretches of cosmic synth work which I originally thought sounded a bit cheesy. But as I got more and more into the album, I came to enjoy it and one completely instrumental synth track emerged as perhaps my favorite. It just really seemed to embody eons of time passing. There are minor quibbles I could make, but the album as a whole is completely successful at creating an epic form of celestial metal. Even power metal fans could get into OLD MACHINES and there's still enough extremity to appeal to death and black metal fans as well. But it's really the concept behind it all that takes this to the next level.
Surely one of the most surprising releases of the year!
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