Music termed "progressive" be it rock or metal, is often approached with a certain amount of trepidation, many still connect the word with the overblown, overcomplex and over-polished music of 70's giants like ELP, Yes and early Genesis despite the fact that bands like Opeth, Anciients , Tool and Mastodon have shown us that you can still be progressive and be gritty. One band who fall into the latter category are Poland's Rigor Samsa, Jacek Berentowicz (vocals); Dawid Molenda (guitar); Jakub Ściślak (bass) and Krzysztof Zając (drums), a quartet whose music is a perfectly balanced blend of complexity and growl, music that can go from a whisper to a scream at any given moment, dynamics which run rife throughout the band newly released second album "Severance".
"
We would like to invite you for a journey into dark and melancholic melodies and lyrics to discover remedy for your own deamons" is the legend gracing the bands
Bandcamp page and the words "
dark" and "
melancholic" are the perfect summarisation of what
Rigor Samsa bring to the table with their second album "
Severance".
Rigor Samsa's music does not so much undulate as spasmodically jerk and twist across its various changes in tempo, dynamics and volume, guitar passages will routinely flit back and forth between ringing arpeggios and crunching chord progressions, bass lines will one minute be low deep an intricate and the next be grizzled and growly while the drumming can range from gentle and featherlight to to aggressive and thunderous in a heartbeat, all of these various dynamics topped off by strong clean vocals that although are very close in tone and delivery to those of
Tool's Maynard James Keenan have enough about them to sit at the right side of being different.
Desert Psychlist could go down the in depth route of diving deep into each of the nine tracks that make up "
Severance"but for the sake of not turning this simple review into a full blown novel we will just say that there is not one track to be found on this marvellous album that would compel a listener to lift the needle or hit the skip button, it is an utterly engrossing opus from its opening note to its final drumbeat.
Many listening to "Severance" will no doubt notice that Rigor Samsa utilize a lot of, what could be called, Tool-isms in their overall musical attack, using those same elements of light, shade, fury and ambience that Maynard James Keenan and his Tool cohorts have, over the years, made their signature. Having said that don't go expecting Rigor Samsa to be some sort of Tool 0.2, Rigor Samsa are not some copyists they are their own animal who bring their own style and feel to the genre of progressive metal/rock.
Check 'em out ....
© 2025 Frazer Jones
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