Behind The Resilience is an album you might have missed. But then it jumped you unaware and you were floored by the potent hit of that unassuming Metal master work.
This is just the kind of crossroads of Post Rock and Metal influences that gets the juices running. The dense urgency of guitar you might love from Cynic. The rhythmic djenty chugging of a Meshugguh. The Floydian swells of Ebowed strings. Epic, introspective, heavy and choppy: it has everything.
What’s more is you have the kind of proper concept album Jon Anderson would dig, but instead of trippy sci-fi-tinged adventures of the innerspace, you have here a story grounded in events all too real as a jumping-off point for an absolutely beautiful instrumental prog epic.
Samples of children at play, of people running in the street, of ubiquitous newsreels hint at the stories being told by these eight tracks. And yet, somehow you can feel what is meant without words (although, delving deeper, each track is accompanied by story fragments). It is a tale as old as time and relatable in stories all over the world, to the Diaspora etched onto your own family tree, perhaps. But this is happening now! This story of Syrian refugees in particular, and of Europe’s self-defeating nationalism (of the political borders we erect in our lands and the prejudicial borders we erect in our minds) in general is not an easy topic to build around, but you feel it in the playful, tense, tragic and euphoric moments of explorative adventurous Prog Metal on Behind The Resilience, a depth of perspective rarely risked, as if you could see into the watery depths, the tragedy of these things that happen every day.
Yet as real and relatable the themes of the album may be, it is so easy to enjoy it on simply a musical level. Behind the Resilience is somehow suddenly your very modest AOTY contender. Something you’ll have your friends listen to they wouldn’t have yet heard. And they will say Damn! That is pretty great, what is this?! Well, it was produced by Chris Edrich, for one, it should not surprise you to know. And as such, it does have a bit of Tesseract energy about its guitar tones and synthy flights and sweeps.
Aside from every other lovely thing going for it, the production not the least of which, you have this fresh approach to making a Metal record. You can definitely hear the eastern and world perspectives; the studied musicians’ perspective. Hold the showboating. Yet, the arguably overused tremolo is eschewed for real chops, and that is a beautiful thing. It simply does everything right. Just that perfect blend of Prog Metal as we know it via varying angles and influences to make it pop and combine with a highly relevant story: simply flawless.
You can’t find fault with this release. Neither the dreamlike textures nor the slowly unfolding riffage – the doomy desert tones recalling certain other drop-D gods of glory past but clearly innovating within their own voice: Katre have here a remarkable release you can not miss. An image of water both freeing and foreboding bookends the record and there is no clearer message of our experience in life as a pastiche of passion and emotion, of danger and elation. Behind The Resilience is much more than the sum of its parts. You must stay tuned to Katre!
