To hear the violin, vibraphone, tubular bells and acoustic guitar of Pleroma‘s opening track, you’d be hard-pressed to guess the technical death metal roots of Orgone, a little-known band on the Pennsylvania scene. Yet this is indeed an extreme metal album, skillfully woven with contrasting passages ranging from the quietest to the most intense.
What distinguishes Pleroma the most from Orgone’s previous two albums is a tendency to open the expressive valves rather than restrict them. Where once we had a mixture of dense, compact musical ideas in rapid succession; here we have a variety of passages that breathe and allow for more lyricism and ambition in the arrangements. The music is still highly progressive, but it’s more mature and takes us on a journey from cello folk ballads to the heaviness of dissonant, angular riffs. There’s only one step between distortion and acoustic instrumentation on this genre-defying hour-long odyssey. While many tracks are instrumental, there is a remarkable vocal variety that weaves an engaging narrative. In particular, male and female clean vocals, both solo and harmonized, add to the multilingual narration and the distinctive mid-range of the death grunts. With tracks ranging from 1 to 18 minutes, Pleroma covers an enormous palette of colours, reminiscent of the ambition of Harmonium, albeit much darker and more bursting, perfectly suited to our era. Surprising bursts of various chamber instruments like a trumpet, various woodwinds, double bass and even balalaika are just the cherry on top of the sundae.
All in all, the road travelled since Orgone’s debut is extraordinary. We’ve gone from a modestly interesting band, for anyone already familiar with death metal, to the maker of a real polymorphous work of art likely to convert the skeptics. It’s even more satisfying now to go back through the discography and hear the logical continuity that undoubtedly prophesied such a stylistic evolution.
