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Reissues can be a spotty proposition. On the one hand, if you reissue a disc by a high-profile band what seems like only months after the original release, it's little more than a way to stick it to the true fans. On the other hand, there are cases like this year's reissue of Augury's 2004 debut Concealed: bonus tracks of course, but also a great way to bring more attention to a release that may not have gotten very widespread attention the first time around. I know I'd never heard of it; to be fair, though, in 2004 I still hadn't made the jump to combining progressive metal and death metal in my listening pile. The first song I'd heard from this album was "The Lair of Purity," which opens with acoustic guitars before transitioning to a distorted groove with some goth metal-like female oohs and pronounced bass riff. The death growl is quickly replaced with a dirty-but-clean folk metal-like vocal; so far everything is going great, and I'm hoping for this mix along with the genre listing as progressive death metal is going to put them in Opeth territory. An Opeth comparison turns out not to be particularly appropriate for the rest of the album, but removing myself from that headspace, there's a lot of great songs. Disc opener "Beatus" is a little bit bizarre, with some angular transitions and a unison duet between clean female vocals and growled male vocals that evokes something like Unexpect. Some songs have a more straightforward melodic death metal lean. Then there are songs like "Cosmic Migration" that have riffs that are a bit out there and make you take notice; the opening bass and drum riff on that song and particular seemed very off-kilter the first several times until I took the time to count it out. The two bonus tracks "Skyless" and "Faith Puppeteers" also appeared on their followup album, 2009's Fragmentary Evidence, but fit well with the rest of the original tracks. This is a somewhat diverse album, hitting a cross section from acoustic passages to grooves to jarring transitions to all-out blasting. But, importantly, it all flows well, with the musicianship and the compositions flowing well as songs rather than the showiness that sometimes comes out of progressive music. This is definitely deserving of multiple listens if you're into progressive music and death metal.
Augury - Concealed (Reissue) Preview and Purchase This CD Online [an error occurred while processing this directive]
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