A minute into the opening, title track of Mouth Of Swords (InsideOut), the new album from The Safety Fire, and you’re hit by full and complex layers of progressive metal and rock that reaches back to the ’70s and forward to the future as it takes inspiration from a broad range of themes and styles. Whether it’s chugging riffs or twidly high-pitched dissonant shredding, smooth flowing grooves or erratic rhythms and arpeggios, higher-range vocals or angry shouting, the songs are a conglomeration of many and varied parts.
Whether you want to call them mathcore, tech-metal, djent or simply progressive metal doesn’t really matter – if you need hummable melodies and choruses you may need to look elsewhere. If you don’t like technical and complex playing, rhythms and song structures, then either make an effort to learn how to listen or go away – find something safe to play with. This is to popular music what Blue Stilton is to Kraft Cheddar..
As an Australian listener of progressive sounds this record feels right at home and the band would fit neatly on the annual Progfest bill alongside bands like Chaos Divide and Glass Empire. For a more international comparison try the likes of SikTh and The Arusha Accord, but the differences are big enough to be distinctive – the vocals in particular being better than either of those two.
Like a lot of technical metal and rock, the instruments take turns in stealing the limelight, also competing with vocals. While they drop back at times it tends to be through volume rather than the composition of their lines that they wrestle control of your ears, and you can only imagine the arguments in the tour bus over control of the stereo. Making good use of dynamics and changes in tempo between songs they keep interest in what can be pretty repetitious, heavy, fast and intense at times. Without this variety you can’t sustain an album of five minute songs for almost an hour.
Where the album is less successful is an inherent problem with this style and it’s common to math rock and mathcore (more so when it’s instrumental) – a low level of emotion. At times the guitar and drumming sounds more like practice exercises, and despite using dynamics with some effect there are no towering crescendos, and there’s no real tension built through any of the songs, none of with are truly epic. There are bands out there like Ne Obliviscaris playing technical progressive metal with much better use of contrast and emotion, and far more epic songs. That’s more about the style than the band, though, and thankfully the vocals do contain a stack of emotion and use contrasting clean and scream to great effect against a backdrop that doesn’t reveal that much. It would have been even better if both vocal styles were used together, but that would raise problems with how to perform the songs live with only one singer.
And of course seeing music like this live is what it’s really all about. Write new songs, let the punters get familiar with them, then blow them away with a strong live performance. There’s no doubt these songs would make a powerful live set that would work either as a headline or energetic support to a wide range of heavy bands.
If you liked The Safety Fire’s last album Grind The Ocean, this one improves on what they did well and will satisfy the need for a bit of dissonance, contrast and complexity in your metal.
7/10
Gilbert Potts