Animals As Leaders

One of the hottest and most sensational movements within the universe of progressive metal these days is probably the djent movement, which has received a lot of media-attention over the last year. There is a lot of interesting djent-based progressive metal out there, and Animals as Leaders' "Weightless" is definitely instrumental djent at its finest.

From beginning to end, the release takes the listener on a journey through a dynamic, but also incredibly coherent and consistent, musical landscape, combining mindboggling odd-metered djent grooves with mellow and ambient passages - often accompanied by beats and other elements from ambient electronica (do not ask me to pinpoint a specific electronica-genre, I am not very well-versed in electronica genre category). Thus the music takes you up and down and in and out and back and forth constantly, but it is all bound together by a certain consistency in sound and approach, and this makes the album incredibly enjoyable to listen to. Most of the tracks are, with an average length of 4 minutes, actually pretty short for progressive metal, bur listening to the entire album is pretty much like listening to one long track, and it is music that you can really lose yourself in, because of the dynamism and consistency. There is also a sort of twisted sense of melody - which is particularly evident in 'Do Not Go Gently', which is a purely amazing track.

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