Album review : PYRAMAZE – Bloodlines
AFM Records [Release date 23.06.23]
Bloodlines is the seventh album in eighteen years from Danish metallers, Pyramaze.
This is a band who rebuilt their line up in 2015, after significant loss of key members in 2011.
It took the new band several albums to reach the kind of equilibrium that resulted in 2020’s Epitaph, their sixth album. It sits outside those narrow “Prog” and “Power” definitions, spreading its wings over everything “Melodic” and “Metal”.
Bloodlines goes a step further.
An amazing sense of musical ambition can often be found among European Metal bands. Often that ambition is rooted in the classics, or at least how the classics have been interpreted by contemporary musicians.
That ambition is woven through these new songs, a handful of which standout head and shoulders above the rest.
The band’s grandiose, three dimensional sound is never bombastic. Like ‘Fortress’s rush of satisfying chord shifts and ascending symphonic sparkle, opener, ‘Taking What’s Mine’ resolves its processed sounds in a kinetic, melodic metal chorus.
Guitarist Jacob Hansen’s arrangement and production is a singular technical achievement. “Technical” can sometimes indicate that the music is icy, lacking any intensity of feeling.
But you only have to listen to ‘Even If You’re Gone’s swelling, cinematic passion and the slick, streamlined, futuristic Prog Metal of ‘Broken Arrow’ to appreciate that there’s an undercurrent of emotion driving these songs, and indeed the album as a whole. ***1/2
Review by Brian McGowan
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