Modern metal and vintage prog rock meet in the middle with this Italian band’s mixing of styles
There’s a reason classic bands like Led Zeppelin and Iron Maiden continue to be popular today, and that’s because they have found a formula that works well and appeals to many. Taking elements from these older bands is always a risky business • you don’t want to seem like you’re lifting someone else’s style, but like you’re simply incorporating the best of it into your own music and building upon it. Thankfully, Pathosray have managed to do just this. Their eponymous album is a mixture of old and new progressive rock and amalgamates elements of Iron Maiden, Guns ‘N’ Roses and Pink Floyd amongst others. Their old-style metal sound has a vintage quality to it that still manages to sound fresh because of their original songs, and lead singer Marco Sandron’s voice sounds very much like Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson, which also adds to the vintage quality.
Beginning the album is ‘Free Of Doubt’, a sweeping piano instrumental that blends classical and modern, a bit like the ethos of the album. This is followed by ‘Faded Crystals’, which is a great introduction to the style and sound of Pathosray. It’s a guitar-led traditional rock song with a synthesied instrumental section, a modern style often associated with bands like Muse. However, apart from sporadic sections like this, Pathosray are a fully-fledged Guitar Band. The epic songs dip and weave on and on and are littered with long instrumental guitar sections that bring the tempo up and down in equal measure.
‘Sorrow Never Dies’ features some great scaling picking and dramatic echoing lead guitar, while ‘Lines To Follow’ has a rhythmic base and fast-driving drum sequences that peak and fall continuously and patch different segments of the song together to form one entity. My personal favourite is ‘The Sad Game’ because it features some memorable riffs and is probably the heaviest of all the songs. In typical prog-rock style it’s 9 minutes and 12 seconds long, and while only certain songs can get away with this, Pathosray don’t over-repeat and draw it out and the length seems to be more a result of experimentation and evolution of the track rather than pure indulgence.
And while ‘Scent Of Snow’ and ‘Emerald City’ are two of the slowest tracks, they don’t necessarily lack any of the impact that the faster songs possess. ‘Scent Of Snow’ utilizes Sandron’s hushed voice to bring down the tempo of the song, which is then brought back up again with the chorus to produce an epic style that peaks with the guitar solo towards the end of the track, while ‘Emerald City’ allows Pathosray to explore the darkest side of their sound with a grinding guitar style and a stop-start rhythm. In fact, apart from ‘In Salicis Umbra’, which treads a little too close to cheesy ballad for my liking, there isn’t a song on the album that I don’t like. This style could easily come across as old-fashioned or out of date, but it’s the quality of the playing that saves it from this. I will definitely be keeping the album where it is in my car!