“Everything will not be all right…”

Straddling a fault line between furious, dissonant tension and mordant melody…March Of Flames submerge metal under an ice flow then drag it back up to the surface like post-hibernatory polar bears hunting for seals. Atop a continental drift of dystopian discourses disseminated with a baroque distaste as though the thoughts cause the vocalists mouth to blister and spawn suppurating ulcers, guitars grind like wheels churning gravel in the desperate escape in a psychological thriller. But this ain’t fiction this is a tectonically tumultuous (put)refraction of the rabidly rapid redundancy and fearsome flights of fallacy of this frightful future. The intense, isolating density and self-consciously arty song titles can be impenetrable but it all adds to the overall feel of being stranded in a vast wilderness – no more so than the trapped in an icy tunnel passionately epic panic-orama of ‘The Waiting Makes Me Curious’ - where you latch onto slivers of slippery beauty such as the steely ‘Mouth’ and ‘My Deer Hunter’ before grasping with the holographic hieroglyphs and whispered snatches of wisdom as you descend unwittingly into a Stygian Saturday Night Live. For hope hangeth heavy in the humour. For all the subtle shadings of latter day Depeche Mode and Radiohead’s affluent alienation syndrome among the metallic viral anguish ‘High As A Horse’ begins like They Might Be Giants, ‘Dog Sized Bird’’s keyboard intro almost careers into Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ and ‘Lycanthropy’ begins like ‘Kids In America’. Cryptic, cinematic, cerebral and macabre math-core metal with elements of pulverised prog that, for all it’s epic soundtrack qualities, remains, and will forever remain, a challenging and rewarding winding map for the disaffected, who expect no answers, let alone grid references.
__________________________________________________

- Stu Gibson