As the old saying goes, “Get yourself a man who can do it all.” Chicago metal staple Mark Sugar caught our attention last year with the second album from his death metal band Bear Mace, Charred Field of Slaughter. We rated it 8 out of 10 and it even cracked our year end list at #27. Wasting no time at all, Sugar managed to spend year two of perpetual global insanity by writing, recording, and releasing the third album from his progressive metal project, Black Sites, entitled Untrue.
The term “progressive metal” has more or less become a veiled term for senseless virtuosity, overblown lyrical concepts, and drawn out arrangements à la Dream Theater. These clichés contradict the very definition of the genre itself. Black Sites are making it their modus operandi to put the “progressive” back in progressive metal. Untrue does so in stupefying fashion, touching on facets of tradition metal, power metal, groove metal, doom, avant-garde, and even hard rock. What’s more impressive than the blend of genres themselves is the band’s ability to execute each with equal conviction.
Untrue opens with the intricate “Sword of Orion”. A cut that combines the adventurous spirit of classic Queensrÿche with the thick riffing of modern day Voivod, it’s prog metal with one foot planted in the past and the other moving forward toward the future. Other tracks that question the listener’s sense of perception in true head trip fashion include the atmospheric chug-o-rama that is “Nocturne / Everything Went Black”, and “Echo of a Lie”, an aimless journey through the bleak metallic void. These songs are deep, both lyrically and musically, but without becoming pretentious in the process.
Some might say that the unorthodoxy of the aforementioned songs are orthodox of progressive metal. That’s a fair point, but how about “The Worst of Us”, a unique spin on the old school USPM formula with Fates Warning-esque twists and turns? Or the retro doom metal swagger of “They Eat Their Young”, which I can’t help but feel is a musical nod to fellow Chicagoans Trouble (R.I.P. Eric Wagner)? Or my choice cut, “Call It By It’s Name”, which boasts the melodies and hooks of a hit hard rock song warped through a prog filter (think Spectres era Blue Öyster Cult)?
The point I’m trying to get at is that Black Sites have managed to make an album that is fresh, exciting, and unique. It’s not rare to come across a band whose music falls into one of the three adjectives, but all three simultaneously? That’s rarer than hens teeth. It’s far too early to predict, but one day in the distant future, Untrue may just be held up to the same pedigree as genre cornerstones 2112, Rage for Order, and Awaken the Guardian. Its contents are of the same caliber as far as this online metal journalist is concerned.
10 out of 10
Label: Independent
Genre: Progressive Metal
For fans of: Queensrÿche, Fates Warning, Voivod