Sermon - Birth of the Marvelous
Since starting this blog I have really fallen in love with Bandcamp as a primary source of new music to try out (alongside adventures through the links of YouTube, iTunes, and reputed record label’s rosters), which is how I found this band/project here, Sermon. Even though Prothetic Records is one of the labels I follow, it took me forging through a series of Bandcamp links to find this one, but it has become another one of those stumble-upon bands that I’m so glad came my way. Prosthetic has labeled them an “anonymous musical force” perhaps to preserve privacy, perhaps to direct focus to the music itself, perhaps to conceal what wealth of experience is possessed by this brand new project’s mastermind(s) to maintain an aura of mystique around how a debut such as this could be so masterfully crafted.
When I saw the cover of Birth of the Marvelous, I thought I was probably in for some proggy, Tool-esque, Soen-ish, alternative metal project of some sort. And while that is indeed what this album ended up being, to reduce it to simply a comparison to Tool or Soen would be criminal, because this album certainly offers such a special experience that those two bands do not and that I have been utterly mesmerized with since first hearing. Birth of the Marvelous is such a tremendously masterful release that it’s hard to believe it’s a debut.
While the album’s mystique penetrates from its anonymous creation into its abstractly liturgical lyrics, its label-given status as a religiously themed concept album with a message of “theological balance” is not as far-fetched or hyperbolic as so many flowery album descriptions tend to be. And the album’s sonic pallet definitely reinforces the aura the lyrics seek to conjure.
So while I’m definitely already making it rather clear how I feel about this album, what makes a debut progressive alternative metal album that treads much of the same ground as the aforementioned contemporaries with such an abstract and variably interpretable lyrical concept so compelling is definitely worth delving into.
I mentioned the similarities to Tool and Soen, but I think this would lean a little more closely to the style of Soen for the vocal similarity and for not leaning much on eccentricity the way Tool have. What aspect of Tool’s sound Sermon does accomplish is the cinematic experience of their music, but they do so much more subtly and less long-windedly than Tool often tend to. The songs on Birth of the Marvelous are really not all that long, and even though they’re rather spacious and aren’t jam-packed with thick instrumentation to give them a sense of grandeur, they manage to achieve such a great sense of grandiosity through the classic prog metal method of intricate structural dynamics and making the most of the subtle accents they incorporate, allowing the choral sections or chants or whatever they include to bolster rather than over-blow the album’s religious experience. In fact, I would say the shorter songs here actually do a little more for the album than the lengthier ones.
With only 7 tracks ranging from just under 4 minutes to just over 8 minutes, the 40-minute-and-change album doesn’t look like a lot for a prog metal album on paper, but once into the music itself, the specs are the last thing beckoning any concern.
“The Descend” opens the album with a brooding, ominous ritualistic vibe made all the more harrowing by the chants of “rise, rise” that accent the lyrics detailing of the shift from adoration to condemnation of a one true savior and the scornful adorning of a crown of thorns. At just 4 minutes, it rather efficiently opens the album’s energetically dynamic ritualistic atmosphere as it ebbs and flows from the more boisterous chanting sections to the subdued eerieness of the verses and the simple yet cathartic climax of the vocal high near the end, showing immediately how well Sermon can take a relatively small serving of ingredients from the prog metal bar and do so much with it.
The eerily-named “Festival” continues the saga of the opening track as “the crowd rejoiced as the the savior suffered without choice” as the “clap their hands” mantra resounds throughout the track. Perhaps even more ominous and gradual in its build than the previous song, “Festival” is definitely a big part of the religious experience the album conjures. The stoic mantra repetition over the subdued rolls of the snare and subtly mixed and slightly distorted guitar provide the suspense the songs builds upon to reach its climax, which the dynamic shifts and choral accents along the way do so well to bring it toward.
“The Drift” is a little smoother and more atmospherically open than the two songs before it, by no means sleepy, still working in some busy tom drumming and guitar distortion amid the more swooning and occasionally falsetto vocals of the song, allowing the later ambient section in the middle to both actually feel like a breather and build into an ethereal post-metal crescendo of tremolo picking and increased cymbal crashes. Being one of the most serene cuts of the album, it doesn’t really continue the tenseness that the first two songs, but it helps the overall energetic arc of album by not spending all the suspense it built up so quickly, resting in the pleasure of the previous two songs’ stimulation to build the anticipation and set up the intensity the the eventual climax, a phase of which comes up next. Lyrically, the song enters more abstract and similarly spacious territory revolving around the connection of the speaker (whoever it is) to the savior and to the bleeding Earth. It’s definitely more meditative where the previous two songs were more ceremonial and direct, a needed draft from the heat of the procession, which resumes in full force on the next track.
The album reaches its midpoint with the gritty double-bass-bolstered distortion grooves and overt metallic heaviness of “Contrition”, which is the most straightforward modern blackened groove metal track on the album, but still makes interesting use of a few unforeseen musical twists: howling death growls, pinch harmonics, low-tuned guitar grooves, an apocalyptic choir/layered-vocal even some varied blast beats. The song’s subject matter takes the subject of contrition itself to an extreme with the lines “curse the sin in me / grant me the end I desire / watch me march into the fire” a frank and open expression of the speaker’s remorse and wish to be purified by hellfire. It’s as upfront lyrically as it is aggressive musically, providing a thrilling piece to join either halves of the album together.
Following the fire of “Contrition” the album moves into its last cool-down track of sorts: “Chasm”. The song is another bit of an abstractly hopeful contrast to the more direct religious tumult of the album’s more energetic cuts, the speaker putting faith in prayer and a father’s hand to brave the falling of stars from the sky. While the waves of ambient guitar echoes of the intro do eventually crash upon the shores in with the cymbals that reel in the tides of greater instrumental fullness, the song remains rather spacious and contemplative amid the angelic choir voices as opposed to the cathartic self-condemnation of “Contrition”. It’s not the most blood-pumping song on the album, rather another bit of a breather (which is needed) before the final two songs on the album.
The album comes through with perhaps the best representative of Sermon’s compositional strengths with “The Preacher”. It’s a progressive metal masterpiece of a song not for any oversaturated mashing together of musical ideas it does in its mix or any overblown sense of grandiosity through easy means. Rather, the song accomplishes the thrilling journey and the grand sense of majesty of songs far more overblown by making all the dynamic shifts, motif changes, and accenting bursts of vocal energy Sermon incorporates count and making them as effective as they can be. It’s very much a comprehensive overview of everything Sermon has done so magnificently with prog metal’s most humble toolbox so far on the album. It also finds the album back at a more sinister thematic tone with the speaker most liker being a titular preacher of sorts claiming to offer the light of a savior through their insight. It’s not very specific about how the preacher is making this claim to the “children of sin”, but the subtle sense of underlying manipulation and malice at the lyrical level is made all the more overt with the dark musical delivery, and it is the dynamic of the instrumentation that makes it one of the album’s best pieces all around.
For it’s final piece, the album revisits the ominous scene set by the opening track with the expounding reprise of the patient and utterly beautifully climactic “The Rise of Desiderata”. Invoking the famous poem about striving to create one’s own happiness, the song wraps up the wild ride of condemnation, abandonment, contrition, manipulation, and restoration of faith by coming full circle to the first-referenced savior. Musically, the album’s longest track does reach for and accomplish that slow build that prog does so well, taking its sweet time through an ethereal ambient section that does so gradually build up with layers of vocals, snare rolls, guitar distortion grooves and atmospheric layers, eventually reaching the denser and more metallic section just before the end and finishing in tremendously climactic fashion with the same chants of “rise, rise” that began the album, this time, summoning one’s own savior rather than the jeers of the cursing crowd. Honestly, as climactic as it is, it could have easily gone longer and pulled off even more musical explosion, but given the aspect of the album’s strength stemming from withholding from going too obnoxiously bombastic in typical prog metal fashion, it is perhaps more fittingly tempered as it is rather than as a classically overdone prog finale. And it is indeed still a satisfying and conclusively complete closing song that provides the right tonal and lyrical closure without spelling everything out too obviously or strictly.
Birth of the Marvelous is an album that is rewarding and thrilling to unpack and whose details and nuances are a joy to become more and more familiar with. It’s spiritual concept, while abstract and not necessarily the most complex, is well-arranged and ultimately proverbially valuable nonetheless. If there’s one major standout feature of this album that takes it above the rest of the prog metal crop, it’s very much Sermon’s seemingly veteran expertise (despite this being the project’s first album) with the dynamics that go into prog metal. It is an album with meticulously placed and effective accents all over that all feel to be in their right and natural places. It’s very much in line with the type of clean, artisan progressive alternative metal that Soen has made their name on, but this is honestly far more thrilling than anything Soen have made, and considering that band’s progress with Lykaia, it’s the masterpiece the new Soen album this year should have at least tried to be. But this is not the time to get on about how Soen disappointed this year, rather how miraculously Sermon has risen from nothingness to spiritual prog metal’s highest peaks.
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