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When was the final time prog metal was actually progressive? Complicated? Naturally. Difficult? Certain. However when it comes to real, boundary-pushing sonic journey, it’s been consuming its personal tail for some time. That’s what makes Beijing’s OU – pronounced ‘O’ – so thrilling.
Their first album slipped in underneath the radar halfway via 2022, however those that had been listening clocked it was one thing distinctive and never just a little particular. Musically, it piled on the knotty riffs and time adjustments, but it surely had one thing else in singer Lynn Wu. Like Björk singing in Mandarin Chinese language, she spiralled and swooped across the excessive registers, creating one thing unworldly and in contrast to anything on the market proper now.
Devin Townsend actually thought so; fashionable music’s maverick-in-chief signed as much as co-produce this follow-up. II: Frailty takes the whole lot that was so nice about its predecessor and amplifies it. Opening music Frailty units delicate piano chords towards a shifting rhythmic backdrop working from tricksy to intense, the latter courtesy of drummer, and ex-pat American, Anthony Vanacore. However it’s Lynn, floating gracefully excessive, who takes it someplace stranger and extra unsettling.
OU incessantly sound like they’ve beamed in from the twenty fifth century, the place this type of factor is extra regular. Purge – that includes backing roars from Devin – is artwork steel made for golf equipment with blinding white partitions and the place vividly colored drinks float in on steel trays. Redemption is a sluggish dawn of a music. Most brilliantly outlandish of all is Recall, its layered, birdlike vocals colliding with a percussive backing that manages to be hypnotic and disorientating on the similar time.
It appears like AI music created by flesh and blood people. How these things will work reside stays to be seen – OU have but to play a gig. However with II: Frailty, they’ve tunnelled via prog steel’s complacency and opened up a wierd new world of their very own.
II: Frailty is out April 26 through InsideOut Music
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