Demimonde: Cygnus Oddyssey (2016)

This album definitely can not be pigeon-holed into one genre.  It is a massive, sprawling beast of an album with a lot of stuff going on musically.  The band was somewhat well-renowned around the turn of the 21st century in their native Czech Republic and released a fairly popular album in 2000.  However, the Prague-based band went on hiatus for nearly a decade-and-a-half before re-emerging with rumblings that this release was imminent, releasing single songs in 2014 and 2015.

The album kicks off in supremely weird fashion, sounding like a band that has spent many hours dissecting Nocturnus's The Key and kicking the keyboard parts up a notch, while dropping copious hits of acid.  Now, that is a fantastic fucking album, so I am definitely on board with the weirdness here.  However, at times it goes a little far.  The first real song on this thing, "The Generation Ship" is REALLY out there.  And then "Event Horizon" kicks in and things get even weirder.  And that is pretty much the story of this album.

As I said, it is real damn hard to try to explain this album in words.  There are so many odd keyboard lines, samples and avant-garde weirdness that it cannot be described adequately, but that is a lot of the fun of this release.  You really have to sit down and listen to it, because a casual listen will not uncover a lot of the oddities going on.  It is hard to even argue that there is a basis in any one particular metal genre.  At first listen, I leaned toward some sort of progressive death metal, but most tracks do not bear any similarity to death metal.  So I will call it avant-garde and call it a day.

The vocals are also something else.  Band vocalist De.polar typically uses death metal-style growls, but there are a number of guests who contribute crooning or operatic vocals throughout.  There are some gems on the release.  "Te Kore" is a very interesting track, despite the keyboards that threaten to overtake the song.   And "Singularity (Absolute Word explanation)" has a damn catchy opening riff, leading into the most straightforward metal track on the album.

The only downside is that there are a lot of moments where the band gets bogged down in crafting an atmosphere and experimenting.  When they are playing actual music, the album is very interesting, but it loses focus on occasion or goes too far with the odd moments.

This is definitely not a casual listening album.  It demands attention and can be very rewarding when attention is paid to it.  But that is the key.  If not listened to carefully, it becomes simply noise.  So, keep an open mind.