Frontiers Music [Release date : 17.11.23]
Hugely underrated Italian Prog Metallers, DGM, continue to provide reasons why they should be underrated no longer.
On their eleventh album now since the debut in 1997, they’ve seen the inevitable lineup changes that inflict themselves on most long lived rock bands.
That said, the current lineup has been in place since 2008. So there’s a strong sense of cohesion and unified purpose to the performances here.
When we reviewed the band’s last album, Tragic Separation (2020), we said: “stylistically, much of the album switches fluidly between genres.”
There’s not so much of that variation now. At least not in the music.
Lyrically, Progrock albums often find themselves trapped by a concept that ties them into meaningless repetition. It’s not a trap that DGM have fallen into with past albums, and there is no obvious concept here, other than the emotional moments we all try to manage, as in ‘The Sorrow’, ‘Second Chance’, ‘Journey To Nowhere’ and others.
The music is dense and intense. ‘To The Core’ and ‘The Calling’ place
great emphasis on bruising rhythms, emphatic axework and hard hitting choruses.
‘Find Your Way’ and ‘Dominate’ pack in elements of hard rock with a strong melodic focus, then fire out the result in a swirl of hardbodied, combative progressive metal.
Vocalist, Marco Basile, and guitarist, Simone Mularoni get the attention. That’s understandable, as they write the songs and provide the route finding, but in fairness to the others, the tracks have the rich feeling that music has when all the musicians are in the room at the same time. Very post pandemic.
Other notable tracks, like ‘Second Chance’ and ‘Neuromancer’ are a tight, solid mix of power metal aggression with vivid progmetal undertones, but it’s opener ‘Unravel The Sorrow’ that really stands out. It’s written around a classy piano melody and adrenalised chord shifts… a bit different and all the better for it. ****
Review by Brian McGowan
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Power Plays w/c 9 December 2024
In this sequence we play ‘The Best of 2024′ GRTR! reviewer selections
Featured Albums w/c 9 December 2024
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