syn.terra's Mellow Evil is an album that defies concise description. It's progressive and metal, but distinct from most strains of "progressive metal." It's often jazzy, even down to the arrangements which frequently use piano and trumpet, but it's much more texturally abrasive than jazz often is. The closest comparison I can think of is to OK Goodnight, but instrumental and with trumpet and more prominent synths.
The album opens with the title track, beginning with a repeated ominous clean guitar pattern. Immediately there's both a thick atmosphere and attention-grabbing rhythms (most of this particular piece is in 5/4, but in a very fluid, natural way). As the guitar figure starts varying itself more, heavy guitar stabs enter before building to a heavy riff with a majestic trumpet lead over the top. This is a piece with a lot of general repetition, but it doesn't feel overly repetitive due to subtle variations across its course. It ends with a dramatic trumpet solo and a piano line that gradually fades in until it becomes a lead of sorts.
The next track, "Skinforest," opens with a beautiful piano passage before giving way to an ever-escalating metal whirlwind, alternating its source of tension between the guitar and piano. The only room to breathe is a tense interlude that quickly morphs back into the track's central core of dizzying, shapeshifting piano metal. One of my personal favorite tracks on the album.
Third is "Bad Pumpkin," one of the weaker spots of the album in my view. It's not a bad piece, but it feels like it has less progression than the previous two despite still having a range of ideas present. The following "Subdermal Krakatoa" opens with a really cool piano figure that is eventually joined by an intense synth lead. It's a very piano-driven track, largely based on a small handful of lines that are easily good enough to base most of a composition around as happens here. The solos occurring throughout are also especially nice, they have a balance of being their own thing while not going off too far.
"Hexacolyte" opens with a great piano/guitar dual riff before dropping into a breakdown with synths flitting about the background. The consecutive piano and synth solos are both excellent, eventually leading to a dreamy synth-led portion and then a dramatic ending with back-and-forth lines traded by the whole arrangement. The sixth track, "Iron Hill," opens with a bluesy guitar riff and some organ over the top before exploding into a heavier reading of the same pattern. This one is largely centered around varying the main riff, and alternates between 2020s metal and retro prog rock-sounding sections; it is, perhaps, an answer to "what if ELP was a modern metal band?"
Track seven, "Leviathan," is another high point of the album, combining a dramatic guitar/synth line with a soaring trumpet lead. The first respite comes with a brief piano break, before morphing into a beautifully theatrical trumpet solo. Overall this one feels like a slower, more melodic counterpart to some of the more jazz-oriented techmetal bands such as Axon-Neuron. The following two tracks, "Raze the Stars" and "Aepocalypse," are both extremely solid tracks but I don't have too much to say about either; the former is fast-paced and unrelentingly heavy, while the latter is dominated by grandiose synths floating over a barrage of heavy riffing.
The closing track, "The Industrial Ronin," opens with some great piano-and-guitar segments before bringing in a swelling synth line and morphing into a series of passages that have a feeling of a proper ending to the album; there's a sense of closure and finality, up to and through the final piano run of the album.
As a whole, syn.terra's Mellow Evil is a beautiful, intense, fascinating album built out of markers that individually feel familiar but as a (remarkably cohesive) mixture create something new and broadly unique. A final point I want to address in this review is that it is a very complex, technical album, but never at any point does it feel like this is for any reason other than in service of the musical experience; there is no needless showing off in the composition or the performance.
