Unlike many of the scribes of Ave Noctum who are black hearted, black souled, black metal warriors, I, the humble author of this piece you are kind enough to be reading, am a bit of an old hippy and Thotch-head, so it was a given that a concept album around the story of Pandora releasing woe upon the world would come to me in the form of ‘Pithos’ by Swedish four piece Insonika. Firstly, as somebody who had to study mandatory Latin and Ancient Greek at school, let me say well done to the band for the title ‘Pithos’, a reference to the jar in which said terrors had been stored by Zeus, especially as most folks refer to “Pandora’s Box”; secondly, I’ll stop prattling on about books I was made to read forty years ago, and get on with the music.
Naturally enough the album opens with ‘Pandora’, the central character of the legend, a single piano playing melancholic tones, a melancholia matched by the possibly accidentally world-weary captured sigh at 25 seconds, before the other instruments join in to build layers of sadness, the lyrics telling of her curiosity that lead to so much darkness upon the earth. The pace increases a little for title track ‘Pithos’, a heavier riff mixing with church organ howls, a counterpoint to the occasionally growled vocals of the curses within the jar begging to be let free. The band then throw in some long drawn-out cries and Mastadonesque flourishes before the track disappears in a long fade out. Some more urgency is injected with ‘Monsters In My Head’, albeit more looping and hypnotic than an all-out shred, although as the song approaches its end a rather fine but all too short guitar solo is added to the mix, just stopping the song tripping into the realm of the repetitive.
It is now that ‘The Plague’ is released, complete with an opening riff that will have many a stoner swaying along for the first half of the song before the music suddenly withdraws into some quiet jazzy drum fills playing along to a lone plucked guitar, every instrument then firing in to help reawaken the listener who may have been about to transition from nodding along to nodding off. ‘Warmongers’ keeps up the noise with a hard rock stomp that builds up into a solid wall of sound, its closing barrage replaced by the lighter opening of ‘Dunes of War’, an opening that more than a little brings to mind the art-rock misery of Radiohead before travelling back in time to some Seventies Prog, the closing duel between guitar and Hammond organ evoking the age of ELP, but with fortunately less overindulgence.
There is nothing bad on ‘Pithos’, and were I to get the chance to catch Insonika preform live, I would happily do so. The only reason I haven’t scored it higher is that there just seemed to be a little something missing from the album to really grab me. At times it seemed a little bit one paced, and a little directionless, vacillating between pure Prog and Stoner experimentation without managing to gel said sounds. That the band members are all far better musicians than I could ever hope to be is not in doubt, and that they are more talented artists than the overly manufactured pap that fills the modern charts is equally obvious. Maybe the added fire and enthusiasm of a live performance would raise the album to new levels. Like what is left in the bottom of the legendary jar, let’s hope.
(7/10 Spenny)
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