Style: Progressive Metal, Post-hardcore, Jazz Fusion (Clean vocals) Recommended for fans of: Thank You Scientist, The Dillinger Escape Plan, The Mars Volta Country: Texas, United States Release date: 14 September 2024
Jazz fusion has a reputation for being slick, cool-as-a-cucumber, and generally uplifting. Take examples like the ultra-clean backdrops of the Local on the 8s segment on the US’s Weather Channel, the slew of Japanese fusion that ranges from Fox Capture Plan’s exhilarating piano pyrotechnics to Shigeru Suzuki’s tranquil Pacific island-inspired new music, or the upbeat nightlife aesthetic conjured by video game music such as the Twilight City theme from Wave Race 64, all of the above exuding optimism and an overall joie de vivre. However, our more studied listeners know that there is a seedy underbelly to fusion, found in places like the “waiting room of hell” jazz utilized on Kayo Dot’s “Vision Adjustment to Another Wavelength” or the manic dissociation on The Mars Volta’s “Cassandra Gemini.” Texas-based Euphonia fall much closer to the latter camp, immediately throwing the listener into a dark swirling abyss in the first few seconds of debut Euphonia: is the album a euphonic experience as advertised despite its unsettling first impressions, or does Euphonia live solely in cacophony?
The best way to describe Euphonia’s style is “weaponized fusion”: similar to The Dillinger Escape Plan before them, Euphonia utilize frenetic jazzy ideas in a metal framework to articulate complex negative emotions, with tracks like “Cacophony” and “Bug On Back” pinballing the listener around jagged and intense passages, other tracks conveying lyrics through creaky vocals about estranged love and self-frustration. However, unlike Dillinger, Euphonia spends much of their time in instrumental pieces with less than half of Euphonia’s tracks featuring vocals, and when they are used, they are rarely if at all harsh, save for a scream at the end of “It’s a Confession” and another near the end of “Decompression Sickness.” Euphonia take time to break outside of their “weaponized fusion” mold as well with quiet math rock pieces (“This Isn’t Just a Prayer”), smooth jazz contemplations (“Springtail”), and lamenting post-hardcore (“Decompression Sickness”).
The imagery conjured by Euphonia is heavily influenced by its pervasive tension and overarching sadness, the sound of waking up intermittently through the night from bad dreams, taking enough time to stare at the moon through your window and recoup your senses before being tossed into the next nightmare. In Euphonia’s beginning moments, “Bug On Back” rattles the listener around frantic drumwork and tense pulsating guitars before tumbling into a featureless void; follow-up “Euphony” teeters back and forth between paranoid saxophone flourishes and glimmers of calmness and peace before the listener is jarred awake on “This Isn’t Just a Prayer,” surrounded by little but a dark bedroom and the sound of your own thoughts. And like a bad dream, the experience morphs around itself in ways that are frightening and difficult to understand, occasionally to Euphonia’s detriment when the more chaotic passages give little to anchor the listener. Faint glimpses of optimism certainly make themselves known, but the oppressive atmosphere ensures these moments are few and far between.
“It’s a Confession,” despite being the shortest track here, ends up being the most engaging: beginning with a brief descent into deconstructed Thank You Scientist-flavored madness, the track quickly coalesces into intense and angular grooves before soaring triumphantly into an Agent Fresco-style reprise of “This Isn’t Just a Prayer,” proving to be the most exciting and climactic moment of Euphonia. The well-defined conclusion helps to give the song a sense of progression despite its nonlinear structure, especially in comparison to many other tracks which are given a bit too much space to play and end up feeling unfocused; the explosive songwriting on “Confession” wholly prevents this. Moreover, the intense instrumentals imply necessity for a more powerful vocal delivery, and as a consequence lines are delivered with more conviction than when delivered in the more breathy vocal style, even topping the track off with a cathartic scream. In less than two minutes, Euphonia manage to speedrun all the high points of their style and deliver the best vocal performance on the album.
Though credit has to be given for the clever interplay of motifs and ideas throughout Euphonia, creating a remarkable sense of cohesion in the piece as a whole despite the chaos, on a moment-to-moment basis, the music can be a little difficult to follow. Even after multiple listens, song structures feel inscrutable and loose at best: there’s never any bad moments by any means, but there’s often very little that ties individual tracks together, a particularly glaring problem on the instrumentals, which aren’t granted the benefit of being grounded by vocals. The biggest exception is instrumental “Springtail,” which slowly evolves its ideas and satisfyingly marinates in its tranquil mood. Moreover, the vocal performance is not exactly my cup of tea: again, there’s nothing bad about the vocal performance, but the two main vocal tracks “This Isn’t Just a Prayer” and “Decompression Sickness” mostly reside in a breathy and too-close-for-comfort vocal style that detracts from the music. I much prefer the full-throated performance on “It’s a Confession,” and would love to see further incorporation of this vocal style in future work over the delicate breathy style on other tracks.
Euphonia are no strangers to irony, as “euphonic” is not the first word I would use to describe their chaotic mix of progressive metal and jazz fusion. It’s clear from the performances on Euphonia that they are having fun with it, too, despite the dread-inducing atmosphere that sits over the album. Unfortunately, the music’s chaotic nature works more against it than it does for it, indulging in labyrinthine song structures that quickly lose the plot, and when the songwriting is more restrained, problems with the vocal performance surface, leaving me in a bit of a bind with Euphonia as a whole. I love the ideas presented here, but Euphonia have a bit of workshopping to do to really perfect their sound.
