ATON FIVE – Aton Five
|
|
Moscow based band Aton Five started out in the psychedelic rock genre, first releasing an EP in 2015, followed by a short live album two years later. The first regular longplayer Solarstalgia came out in 2018, before the compilation of remastered, unreleased and live tracks Childhood’s End meant just that. The band’s psychedelic period was over, just in time for the Covid pandemic hitting the planet. Working on the second longplayer took its time: there were line-up changes, often the band had to track back to parts that had to be redone. The guys wanted to reinvent themselves, and that takes time. Fortunately, even though they might have been close, they never gave up, so that their self-titled new album finally saw the light of day in April 2023. A lot has changed since the past. The songs are generally longer than on the previous records, but that doesn’t mean that they follow in the same often loose footsteps from back then. Instead the musicians put an emphasis on composition, so that the band’s current style is much closer to progressive than to psychedelic rock. The eight-and-a-half-minute long opener Alienation is a masterpiece of progressive hard rock, recalling the sound of the seventies. The tight rhythm section gives the guitar ample room to unleash solos, the latter being always in the interest of the song. The Hammond organ might remind you at times of Deep Purple. The bass guitar has a nice punch, and the intricate breaks could also have come from Dream Theater. The song’s second part has a heavier, even doomier sound, features a synth solo, and actually proves that you don’t need vocals to make a hard-hitting prog song. The following Naked Void is exactly as long as the opener, was pre-released as a first single and surprises with an eighties synth melody, giving it all a certain cyberpunk flair. This song is not as heavy as the previous one, takes a little longer to dig itself into your brain, but once lodged inside your head, you will be convinced of its excellent structure and melodies. Especially the bass solo coming at the one-and-a-half-minute mark is giving me goosebumps. The three-minute short Clepsydra is a mellower track that comes across like an ambient interlude. Things pick up steam again with the eight-minute long Danse Macabre, another fiercely hard-rocking prog song, even though it surprises towards the end with a wonderful piano solo. The album’s magnum opus is the twenty-two-minute-long Lethe which actually started life as an interlude but then refused to stop growing. While I prefer the album’s “shorter” song, I still have to concede that this is well composed track that doesn’t need free jamming to pad its length to over twenty minutes. Back in 2018, I really like Solarstalgia, but frankly, the new and reborn Aton Five are a huge improvement over their past selves. If you like progressive hard rock music with enough muscle but just as much technical finesse, and you don’t mind the lack of vocals (I certainly don’t!), then you should definitely check out this fifty-minute-long album full of (mostly) long and always convincing instrumental progressive rock songs. Welcome back ,Aton Five! Now that your childhood is over, I wish you a happy adolescent and adult life full of further such good albums. |
|
5 songs |
|
|
50:29 minutes |
|
|
***** **** |
|
|
Genre: instrumental progressive rock Label: Mars |
|
