Description
Digipak
It took three long years for the long awaited follow up to the great Iconoclast album to finally arrive. Once again the band throws the listener a curve ball by going from Doom/Death Metal to a more sinister and generally pissed off Dark Metal sound. One of the first things I noticed is that The Teluric Manifesto is an incredibly hard to digest and genre-transgressing disc and I needed lots of listens to build a relatively objective impression of the album. If Poema Arcanus labelled themselves in the past as “Dark Progressive Arcane Metal” (which was pretty accurate at that time, especially “Arcane” instead of “Doom”), now that definition is absolutely obsolete, because although the base is still an underdeveloped and drowned Doom Metal, the band flirts with lots of inspirations from Gothic Rock or even Jazz. The song writing is absolutely free-style, we don’t see a clear structure and there can be so much difference between the parts of the same song that it’s difficult to realize when a track ends to let another one start. Mental work is required of the listener to make a picture of this whole machine and its different gearings. You won’t find here anything even remotely similar to a chorus, a main riff or a constant drum line and vocalist Claudio Carrasco takes absolute liberty to change from growling to clean voice and vice versa. Still, what seems to be dreadfully confusing at first, turns rather coherent when you get accustomed to it, and so the disc grows a lot and shows itself with time. The Teluric Manifesto is a daring, different effort and the result is a highly original album that you can like or not, but marks a standing point over which one of my most respected bands can explore awesome new landscapes. There are things left to improve, especially in terms of song-structure, but Poema Arcanus can come back with big stuff in some years if they keep walking their newfound path.
Track list:
1. Dreamsectary
2. Circos
3. Nihil
4. Sadim
5. Absinthe
6. 51% Dead
7. Promised Light
8. Stone And Magma
9. Us