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Rating: Finally, a truly great album. I confess, it has been a long time since I last found myself saying such a thing about a metal album. When Pestilence released this "Spheres" back in the distant 1993, I was nothing more than a drooling brat who certainly wouldn't have been interested in the music scene of those years, especially in death metal. Alongside the usual small and large commercial crap, a new subgenre was blossoming under a veil of indifference, vulgarly called jazz-metal. What a grotesque name! Critics coined this definition not knowing how to classify that strange and misunderstood music disseminated by Floridian groups like Atheist and Cynic, in which violence for its own sake is shaped and reshaped by undisputed technical prowess. Pestilence too, led by guitarist Patrick Mameli, do not shy away from playing their part in this highly talented field.
Led by guitarist and singer Patrick Mameli, Pestilence, after showcasing all their brutality and skill in their early works "Malleus Maleficarum" (1988), "Consuming Impulse" (1989), and after laying new promises for sound innovation with "Testimony of the Ancients" (1991), continue unwaveringly to elude classification, once again astonishing the record market with an unrepeatable product. Besides the established Patrick Uterwijk (guitar) and Marco Foddis (drums), the group recruits bassist Jeroen Paul Thesseling, whose undisputed technical abilities blend magnificently with those of his bandmates in each track.
The result is a unique sound, never so refined and enchanting, thanks to the digital pickups used to distort the scores. And here we open a parenthesis. Being as conservative as I am, this whole story of "too artificial" guitars smelled a bit fishy to me, as I'm more inclined to the raw and unadulterated fits of the strictest thrash tradition. I had to change my mind when noticing the absence of a keyboardist in the lineup. But how? The album is full of melodic openings, scattered here and there even within the individual pieces, sensual and effective in their deceptive simplicity. Credit goes to some session musician in the recording studio? Not at all. The elegant work of those four Dutch boys with their respective traditional instruments catapults the listener's ears into a dreamy journey, through the unknown realm of the human mind. Dreams, visions, and reality intertwine in the ambiguous lyrics of Foddis, in exciting poetic-musical tensions found in tracks like "Personal Energy", the title track "Spheres", the powerful "Mind Reflections" or "Changing Perspectives", just to name a few. The instrumental tracks "Voices From Within" and "Phileas" are exceptional, noteworthy simply because they are stunning, even in their brief duration.
"Spheres" is all this, and much more. Discovering it will be a pleasure, loving it a duty.
Highly recommended for those who love music, totally inaccessible to the masses.
Tracklist and Lyrics
01 Mind Reflections (03:21)
Unconscious, conscious
Your mind is trapped, your body is free
A senseless life in silence
Your eyes are closed, yet you see
Within your personal world you see
a realization of what could be my soul
or is it just my fantasy?
A timeless world unreal
Reach out for all you can not feel
Things you have seen
at places that you have never been
Invision what turns out to be
a part of life's history
Flashbacks of things to come
Past and future are on
Mind Reflections
Mind Reflections
Roam into the nowhere of pleasure
Behold through your inner eyes
Experiences of human nature
appear on the screen of imagination
Seen by the restless mind
The source of subconscious visions
04 Aurian Eyes (01:32)
[Performed by P. Mameli with the Roland midi guitar synthesizer]
["Dedicated to my lovely wife Kim"]
06 Personal Energy (04:08)
[music: Mameli]
[lyrics: Foddis]
The temple of the soul
Home of the spiritual source
Blessed with powers we unfold
Human magnetism, uncontrolled
Personal energy
The magic of nature
A presence of ourselves we cannot see
Personal energy
Consciousness, life towards the essence of eternity
A domain of harmony
Captured past and future
A vision of reality
Divided structures, the higher senses, polarity around all creatures,
Increasing possibilities of self-discovery,
Energetic thoughts creating electricity
[Lead guitar synth: Mameli]
[Lead: Uterwijk]
08 Spheres (03:29)
[music: Mameli, Uterwijk]
[lyrics: Foddis]
The Highest Intelligence as the explaining principal of existence
Visions and conclusions eager to reveal some kind of significance
Critical realism, an imperfect reality
Knowledge, a human construction of theories
Moving the limits of wisdom to edges of its disappearance
Explantions captured in schemes of time
Unfolded with human interference
The emptiness of ignorance in a darkened void of mystery
Unanswered questions to be solved by the presence of some de‹ty
Spheres!
[Lead: Uterwijk]
An endless galaxy of time zones, dimensions, preserve the astral secrecy
The unity of time and space, a human philosophy
A faithful reflection, an imperfect reality
Knowledge, a human construction of theories
Spheres!
[Lead guitar synth: Mameli]
10 Phileas (01:16)
[Performed by J.P. Thesseling]
[Discords performed on Leader 4-string. Bass lead on Lag Force 6-string bass Eventide 3000]
11 Demise of Time (03:40)
Within the bounds of begin and end
lies the evolution of all that lives
Repeating history is its time ahead
Technology seems so primitive
Different eras unknown to man
set standards we've tried to discover
Revealing purposes of future lives
explain the presence, past, the ever
Monuments misplaced in agelessness
They fill the void of what used to be
Lives beyond the ones we know
The mind's view on surreality
Days fade out the clock of existence
when dreams start to roam the nowhere
Birth of new beings in nature's creation
to die and evolve in a new sphere
Demise of time
Behold the vision of all dimensions
from the perspective of eternity
Decades meet before my eyes
surrounded by the edges of reality
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By jigoro
We are faced with an album of enormous caliber, magnificent, complex, incredible in its thousand facets that surprise listen after listen.
The four geniuses brought to life in this 'Spheres' eleven sublime Tracks destined to enter forcefully into the heads of the most cultured and refined metalheads.
