Hello and welcome back to Bandcamp Buried Treasure, where I'll be hunting down Buy It Now/Free Download-payment option albums on Bandcamp by the best bands you've never heard! The goal is to introduce you smaller bands or obscure side-projects you might not have heard of. Anything to expand your musical horizons by just a little bit each week, all while keeping your cost (potentially) down! This week we'll be listening to Aborted side-project-shred Mendel!
Mendel, or the side project of Aborted guitarist Mendel Bij De Leij, describes himself as "Back in [a] band" and "progressive metal," which is eerily accurate. Just hitting play on the Subliminal Colors first track "Shores," you're taken from a nice litle musical box melody, to a huge organ with some serious balls, to metal and shred… and while that might sound pretty tasteless as most instru-metal music is wont to do, Mendel knocks the damn thing right out of the ballpark. Just go from that to the next track "Messengers," which is more along the lines of a Paul-Wardingham-meets-classic jams thing, to the next track after that titled "Fall," which sticks more to a Dream Theater-ish ambient kind of sound without all the boring of the aforementioned. What I'm saying is that Mendel knows damn well how to write a track and keep it interesting the whole time without resorting to the usual gimmicks of instru-metal (stupid solos, extended riffs that only evolve slightly from section to section that get boring, and switching to a new riff every three seconds in order to try and keep you interested). Like most of the music I've been featuring, Mendel knows damn well how to compose a song; that is, the man can write from section to section and keep it different without jumping too far from the overall tonality of the song. There are simply no mistakes.
Some of my favorite tracks are "Moleculair Veil," which is everything I would ever want a blues death metal band to be when going for a funky song (weird, but trust me), and "Sumerian Sun," which takes essentially everything everyone loves about progressive metal band riffs ala The Safety Fire and Intervals, trims the fat right the hell off, and makes them… listenable. Not a big fan of wank and there's none to be had here.
Just one more note about how awesome this album is; it ends with a 25-minute metal symphony that will destroy your entire universe and everything you thought you knew about writing music… and that's where this album succeeds. It doesn't try to be anything in particular, but never strays too far from a heavier core sound. There's plenty of cool instrumentation, riffs, patterns, licks, solos, you name it. Everything on Subliminal Colors is so unbelievably tasteful that… just go hit play and find out.
