This is the third album from US progressive metallers The Gorge.
Mechanical Fiction contains 45 minutes of modern, heavy music. The Gorge are an interesting band, in that they are ostensibly a band you’d give the tags of progressive metal and technical metal too, but they also incorporate avant-garde and jazz elements into their style, as well as having an underpinning hardcore/sludge influence that’s formative.
Mechanical Fiction is an album of high musical proficiency. It’s full of technical wizardry and intricate complexity, yet this is carefully balanced against the need for actual songs and valid hooks. The promo blurb mentions bands such as Botch, Mastodon, Animals as Leaders, Intronaut, and Meshuggah as reference points, which should set the scene for what The Gorge get up to here. To this list I’d also add names such as The Ocean, Misery Signals, Isis, Burnt by the Sun, and Deadguy.
The atypical riffs, melodies, structures, and compositions are pressed into the service of creating songs with no small amount of meaty substance. There may be style here in abundance, (some of the music is very striking and instantly impressive), but there’s also a depth of songwriting and delivery that goes beyond ostentation and showing off; The Gorge’s technicality is here for a reason, and doesn’t exist purely for the sake of itself. As such, Mechanical Fiction is a collection of songs first, and a showcase for a very skilled bunch of musicians second.
Despite the technicality, The Gorge deal in riffs, riffs, riffs, and Mechanical Fiction is packed with them. Small ones, big ones, ones that twist and turn, ones that stop and start. Whether it’s an unusual time signature or a straightforward beat-driven groove, these songs know how to rock out. The Gorge remind me of a contemporary incarnation of the sort of mathcore we had so much good stuff from a couple of decades ago, only updated to the current age and enhanced with the additional influences previously mentioned.
Mechanical Fiction is a strong and satisfying exemplar of how to fuse progressive metal and mathcore into a substantial, enjoyable whole. The Gorge have produced an album that is worth spending much time with to unlock its hidden-in-plain-sight secrets.
Very highly recommended.
Wonderbox Metal 