Aephanemer - Prokopton

Having just a few weeks ago spent a good deal of time listening to, writing about, and pleasantly enjoying the new Children of Bodom record more than I had anticipated, I was primed and ready for Aephanemer’s sophomore LP, Prokopton, an unabashedly indulgent melodeath record right in Bodom’s vein with no sense of shyness about shooting for the most glorious sound possible. I mentioned in my post about Totaled’s Lament my need to trim these preambles down as the flow of releases in the year starts to pick up, so that I’m not spending ass-loads of time delving into mildly relevant context, and getting behind as a result. Once again, this album lends itself well to a short intro because it is a very stylistically straightforward album with a clear appeal, and once again, I do not feel compelled to brief the context surrounding it, both because it does not affect my enjoyment of the album,and because my knowledge of said context is quite minimal.

I mentioned in my post about Children of Bodom’s Hexed that I have some difficulty connecting with the occasionally light-hearted style of blackened melodic death metal that they employ. And even though I’ve been at least a cursory fan since high school, I find myself only somewhat drawn to them for the freshness and fun they can bring to my listening among all the more overtly pessimistic and abusive shit on rotation. But when they want to, Children of Bodom can indeed drop the synth lines and turn up the darkness and pump out some deadly rockers that can certainly get you moving, and Hexed had a lot of that. And though it takes a more grandiose and try-hard route, so does Prokopton.

It’s a big, and bombastic album that incorporates much of the symphonic elements that make similarly grand folk metal albums from the likes of Korpiklaani so massive. Consequently, it occasionally takes on a bit of that folk metal vibe as it reaches for the epic. But the band’s knack for proggy incorporation keeps it mostly out of the ruts that the easy access to the cinematic through big orchestration can often lead bands into. Sure the saturation does get a bit numbing after a while and it really forced the band to justify their use of it, but aside from a few brief stretches of overexposure, they do.

From a writing standpoint, the band thankfully doesn’t simply coast through the typicalities of the subgenre carried on the special effects they bring in, and it’s certainly the continuous compositional energy that’s put into each song that makes Prokopton such an impressive early statement for them. The band spice the album up with plenty of diversions from the norm like the string-backed blast beats on “Snowblind”, the gnarly palm-muted grooving on “Back Again”, and the headbanging  and particularly melodic and slightly power-metal-tinged guitar leads on “Bloodline” (which is undoubtedly my favorite song on the album).

Overall, Prokopton is a bold and confident piece of melodeath from a band that clearly knows exactly what they want to do with the style, and backs up that desire with enough dynamic writing to maintain the massive sound they shoulder all across the album. I’ll be interested to see what ambition the band take into thissound going forward, possibly trying something even more cinematic.

It definitely doesn’t suck/10