Welcome to The Harmonic Series, a music review series - exclusive to Steemit - where I’ll be discussing music across many different styles and genres from metal, to electronic music, to jazz and beyond! I’ll be talking up exciting new releases, some of my personal classics, and anything else that I think is worth checking out. Some of the reviews I share will be brand new, and some will be from my personal archives.
Today’s review is from my album-a-day archives and, up until I started this series, was the longest album review I'd ever written. It's also the second longest album I've ever listened to, and easily one of the most ambitious. This review was written right after first listen and as such takes a different form from my usual reviews. Additionally, it refers to a 2015 year-end list that I had been taking many recommendations from for my daily albums; the composer of this album was the author of that list:
Potmos Hetoimos - The Paragon Trisagion (Self-Released, 2017)
Genre: Metal
Style: Sludge, Progressive, Doom, Post-Metal
[this is my longest review and the longest album I've listened to yet. The Paragon Trisagion is a three hour Christian prog sludge metal album with incredibly deep themes and a wealth of musical ideas. there's a very thoughtful song about LGBTQ solidarity as well, so don't let the Christian part dissuade you from checking this out. the length on the other hand, I wouldn't blame you... but the album is very good. if you want to really delve into something massive and challenging, this may be the album for you]
This is it: the album by the guy who wrote the year end list that so much of this months listening was taken from. This is a 3 hour long, 21 track metal album with an hour long final track. It seems that when this person does something, they really go in on doing it with ambition and on a massive scale. There's even an option on the bandcamp page to get a 30 page or so PDF for about $5 which details the final track. I don't have that yet but I'll probably get it if I enjoy this. This is the longest thing I've listened to for this album a day thing yet.
Boy, was this a lot to process. It's worth noting that this is by-and-large a one person project, with some guest vocals and strings, but all the composition and the core instrumentation is by Matt Matheson. Among the many interesting things about this record and its creator - which I didn't know until I started listening - is that he is a devout Christian, and this accounts for much of the core themes of of this album. This gave me a tinge of apprehension, as "Christian music" evokes worship or preaching - things I have no interest in. However, considering everything I already knew about Matheson, and that I was already a few minutes in, I wasn't too deterred. More crucially however, this album doesn't get bogged down in faith as a flawless compass by which to live, but rather takes an approach and mentality more akin to the thoughtful interrogation and questioning of ones faith associated with Judaism. Most crucially, this is not music in service of faith or worship; this is music about faith and religion.
Even with that out of the way, there's a lot to consider here. This seems largely centered in prog, sludge, and maybe a little post-rock as well. In a review of this that I read, Matheson was quoted as explaining this album partially as having the goal of making songs that have immediate distinct appeal from each other, as opposed to the apparently more subtle and longer for ideas in his previous trilogy of funeral doom albums. That's quite an ambitious goal for a three hour album, but I think - based on as much as one listen can divulge - he succeeded. When albums reach lengths like this, and things start blurring together, one really has to ask the question of whether that's because the artist ran out of ideas or whether one has run out of attention span or capability to absorb as a listener. The longest album that I think I have a good grasp on is Kayo Dot's Hubardo, at 100 minutes (1 and 2/3rds hour), and things around the 2 hour mark start getting really hard to grasp. From what I did understand however, this album sounded really good. I never felt like I was hearing the same ideas over; Matheson takes from several stylistic traditions in metal other than the core styles of this album. There were mathy parts, black metal sections, some clean parts with vocals that reminded me of Mr. Bungle a little bit, and hard grooving parts, as well as ambient and electronic influences on a few tracks. The production was mostly solid, thought I think the vocals were a little dry occasionally and the guitar tones could have been richer or fuller at points. The vocals were the only sonic thing that ended up actually turning me off at times. The harsh vocals weren't always my favorite but they generally serviced the music fine, and this is mostly a personal taste issue; the clean vocals were mostly pretty non offensive, but the middle third of this album had at least one song with generally weak performance, and one with whiny, almost pop-punk sounding vocals that I really disliked. However, the whole thing was long enough that this was easily forgivable.
Thematically, this album had more going on than I could possibly write about, but I'll give a little bit of what I picked up. Early on in the album, Matheson demolishes the notion that this could ever fit into a mainstream idea of Christianity or have some inherent bias associated with the religion; the song Amethysts would likely go over pretty poorly with the average Christian, as it is essentially an anthem of solidarity with LGBTQ folks. In the review I mentioned earlier, Matheson was quoted talking about religious folks he knew who had struggles with coming out or transitioning, and how this forced him to confront his own notions of right and wrong. The song, from the perspective of someone who has just come out (in a broad sense), describes the treatment they receive from other religious folks and the ostracism they face. It criticizes the "twisted dogma" that motivates this treatment, and essentially asserts that there should be room in faith for all orientations and identities. Another theme on here is the denouncement of misplaced criticism in religion in the aptly titled Strawgod. While I'm not entirely sure what this song is expressing, lines like "hollow answers wracked by endless questions" and "assail the infinite with finite comprehension" offer strong hints. I'm not sure, but it's either criticizing people who criticize religion lazily, or people within the church who have a narrow and stagnant discourse about what religion is. In the overwhelming 55 minute final track, which is divided into 9 movements, I distinctly noticed the themes of the sixth movement, which vividly described a glimmering "utopia" of knowledge, logic, and progress, that was mechanical, unfeeling, and dogmatic under on further inspection. Again, it wasn't clear to me if this was criticism leveled at mainstream western society or at the organized forms of his own religion.
The Paragon Trisagion was massive and ambitious, and not without its flaws, but overall a very well crafted and impressive album. This thing is dripping with heavy themes and implications, and there was clearly an insane amount of effort and time put into this. I can't possibly do it justice with a review of any length, and I don't know when I'll get the chance to delve into it again, but I'm really interested to go through Matheson's list again and find more things to listen to, and also maybe look into some of his other music. This album does a lot of things well, but perhaps most interestingly, it makes a strong case for not just writing off explicitly religious music with its deeply aware and thoughtful lyrics and ideas.
To buy/stream The Paragon Trisagion, head over to Potmos Hetoimos' Bandcamp page.
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