Artist: Eccentric Pendulum
Album: Winding The Optics
Label: Unsigned
Mixed and Mastered by: Daniel Bernath
Release Date: September 2011
Peculiarity of something is defined as the oddity which it attains or exhibits, when nature is taken as a reference. Not often comes a time when it becomes totally impossible for an individual to classify a certain band based on its genre. Metal music has grown so much that we have absolutely insane names like depressive suicidal black metal, blackened death metal, nu metal, avant-garde, etc. given to the genres which a band plays. Despite the whole taxonomy, I simply couldn’t push this band in any one particular alley. As their name suggests, Eccentric Pendulum has peculiar style of music. Their inimitable genre displays a blend of ferocious technicality and wondrous grooves augmenting to its already mature sound.
Formed back in 2008, Eccentric Pendulum released its first EP, ‘Sculptor of Negative Emotions’ in 2009, months after its formation; became the first Indian band to perform in the monstrous Wacken Open Air in 2011; shared stages with bands like Opeth, Kreator, Meshuggah, TesseracT, Amon Amarth, etc.; and came out with a brilliant debut album ‘Winding The Optics’. Very few bands in India have succeeded in achieving such an impressive timeline in so short time
‘Winding The Optics’ clocks up to about three-fourth an hour and is a gold mine for listeners of progressive and technical music. In spite of having just 7 tracks, each track exceeds the usual length of a song. Though the tracks on the album have a weird song structure, I never felt that there were abrupt changes or the record lacked anything. All the progressions have been delicately connected through well-tailored bridges. We can experience some splendid musicianship throughout. There is a substantial amount of contribution by every member in the band.
The album kicks off with somewhat melodic and technical intro of the mindboggling piece, ‘The Axioms Of Aphotic Expressions’ which transcends into a section of breakdowns after the first verse ends. Like most tracks on the album, the song goes through many tempo changes with odd time signatures at places. After the breakdown ends, the song enters into a very ambient and trippy fragment consisting of clean vocals. This is the only track on the album which features clean vocals on it. The song ends with a beautiful dreamscaping solo which follows a thrashy section, becoming my favourite of the album.
The album enters into its more progressive bit with the tracks ‘De-Engineer The Prevalent’ and ‘Paragon Impermanence’. Both the tracks are somewhat technical and thrashy with a deep progressive essence and merge into clean guitar progressions somewhere in midst of the song. The clean guitar section on ‘Paragon Impermanence’ has a very surrealistic tinge to it as opposed to the aggressive mood of rest of the song and includes an amazing bassline. It also features a solo with incredible five string sweeps towards the end, which elevates it even more.
Except for the last song, rest of the songs are slightly stable and undergo less number of transitions. However the trend of eccentricity carries on, obviously. ‘Become Me’ and ‘My Eucalyptine Depth’ are technical and groovy tracks with a nice amount of aggressive screams. Both the tracks, though nicely composed, tend to get a bit tedious as they progress. And as weird the name sounds, ‘Mathematicians Of Ambient Depth’ is a strange track with an amalgamation of djent wallops with thrash riffs. The mood of the song remains constant throughout, although there are many changes in the song. The brilliant solo played on the harmonic minor scale appears at about the halfway mark of the song.
‘Anonymous Existence’ is a galloping eleven minute instrumental, containing really melodious clean harmonies with heavy breakdowns in some places. It indulges us into its surreal atmosphere which toggles between maelstromic harmonies and frivolous progressions, pretty similar to works of the Swedish metal giants, Opeth. The song is a good example of quality composition.
The production of the album is really good. The tracks exhibit a nice amount of dynamics; the instruments have been panned perfectly. The only downside I felt was the guitar patch used; it could have used more amount of gain and bit of reverb, to be gelled even more precisely to the rest of the instruments.
Summing up, the album is a brilliant release by the band and is a must for all heavy listeners.
