TIME OF ORCHIDS: Melonwhisper CD. Extreme Progressive Metal / experimental avant-garde metal. Check whole album (audio)

Description

5.0 out of 5 stars A truly wonderful album!
Time of Orchids is one of the most original and diverse bands out now. Their sound is lush and bizarre and beautiful. Melonwhisper is one of the weirdest albums I’ve ever heard and definitely my favorite.

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Studio Album, released in 2001

Check all samples:   Melonwhisper by Time of Orchids

Songs / Tracks
1. Empress’ Curfew Inviolet
2. Age Gracefully
3. Thread Of The Dream
4. Ulcer
5. Laugh Track
6. Party Favors
7. Scolex Throne: Shame Of Heaven
8. Graduation Day www.progarchives.com/mp3.asp?id=1858
9. Son, I Saw It

Line-up / Musicians
– David Bodie / drums
– Eric Fitzgerald / guitar, vocals
– Jesse Krakow / bass
– Chuck Stern / keyboard, vocals

Releases information
Self-released in the US
Bad News Records in Japan
With pianist Marilyn Crispell

Time of Orchids takes just about any musical idea and crams in together just for fun. The first track for example, puts musique concrete together with hardcore, free jazz, techno and progressive rock…plus others I’m sure I’m forgetting. The musical skills of the people involved with this band is unquestionable. Just when you think you’ve heard all of what this band does, track two starts and introduces some thrash attacks paired irreverently with calm jazzy passages, death metal-esque backing swells, and a trip-hop outro. In fact, new sounds and styles show up throughout this disc…including, but not limited to, video game sounds, classical elements, and soundtrack-styled drama. Still, there is a predominance of
heavy riffs and other “metal” prerequisites, so be not afraid. Like dissonance? Well, Time of Orchids is all about dissonance. There are piano runs and harpy plucks that sound way out of tune with the rest of the song, creating this messy volatility that works so well. Violent and brittle is just one way to describe ‘Melonwhisper.’ The vocals stick mostly to metalcore-styled screaming, but there are also the inevitable Patton-esque spoken word and crooned moments. The screaming emphasis is cool because it sets this band up as a hardcore band with odd influences and not as a bunch of music school grads with a desire to show off as much as possible. The fact that the songs break down completely into noise is kind of neat as it allows the band to nicely segue song to song. There are parts of this disc that sound a whole lot like Skinny Puppy, John Barry and Deadguy- another fact that makes this disc more than another rip off of Mr. Bungle, Secret Chiefs 3, or John Zorn.