A bit of everything here from Texan project Sarpa. It’s not often you hear a driving African drum beat fused with black metal. That was for openers. Black metal fury continues with “Triad of Might”. It’s expansive, epic and downright odd in parts. A tuneless piano cuts in discreetly as a rock based wall of sound falls out of the black clouds and ashes. I’m hearing the distinct sound of Opeth epicness here. It has that same swinging tempo and pitch. Meanwhile the vocalist roars and growls like Åkerfeldt.
That lively tribal drum beat kicks off “Predacious Dimensions”. Thanks to that, this one has a real hook to go with the blackened metal melody. Mid way, it breaks off into a kind of progressive passage before turning thrashy and infusing itself with death metal. It’s a one-man riot out there. You can’t accuse it of standing still. We hear the sound of a crowd and the drum beat again. I hear doom. We’ve covered most genres by now. Actually, not all, because there’s an acoustic passage to end this enigmatic track. “Evanesce” passed me by after the eclectic experience of “Predacious Dimensions”. Death and black fury dominate “Anguishing Reveries”, another turbulent explosion of sound wall filled darkness. The crowd chant, and we are taken to the title song. Its big opening takes up two minutes, which for a five minute is a sizeable chunk. Then, three minutes in without transition, a moody acoustic passage takes over. Schizophrenia might have been a more suitable track title than “Solivagus”. I’m assuming that the album’s title is based on the Latin meaning lonely wandering. As a one man project, that fits. To finish there is a ten minute track “Horizons World Beyond”. It has the black technical progressiveness of earlier tracks. The song meanders from one heavy black-thrash scene to another, while creating the image of a murky world.
“Sarpa was created to bend the laws of audible physics”, declares the artist. “Solivagus” is certainly intriguing and blends genres. Where song structures are concerned, it’s as if rather than being experimental, which could be a description, the ideas are incomplete and haven’t been taken to their conclusion. Musically, this is a mysterious and even anarchic world, with which at times I was at one and at others I had difficulty making a connection.
(6.5/10 Andrew Doherty)
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