Then three albums into Amplifier’s recording career, the sprawling epic double that is 2011’s The Octopus, was some four years in the making. Its follow-up, last year’s Echo Street was then written and recorded in sixty days flat. On their new album Mystoria, the Manchester quartet have now adopted yet another different approach towards the gestation of their studio music. They took four months rehearsing the songs that would eventually appear on this album and then just four days recording them. But no matter how its conception and development may change with each passing record, the music of Amplifier fundamentally still remains a spectacular confluence of progressive rock and heavy metal.
Amplifier may well have copied and pasted their basic template from another era – the early ‘70s to be precise – in a strange union between Black Sabbath and some of the huge monoliths of British progressive music, but behind that hulking façade and over the course of their fifteen year history they have forged their own identity. It is one born of the Byzantine imagination of the band’s leader, guitarist and singer Sel Balamir and one that has evolved beyond the limitations of such broad genre classification.
It is Belamir’s guitar with which Mystoria sets sail, launching the record into orbit on ‘Magic Carpet’. Fast, furious and fortified, it is a clear taste of all that is to come. ‘Black Rainbow’ sounds as if someone has stuck the boot right into The Groundhogs 1971 post-blues apocalypse long player Split and kicked it forward in time some 40-odd years. ‘Named After Rocky’ could equally be named after Iommi, Osborne, Butler and Ward such is their collective influence on its sledgehammer riff. And ‘Cat’s Cradle’ introduces psychedelic ska into an already febrile mix, with the swirling mist of lysergic acid reappearing further on down the line on the cataclysmic ‘OMG’.
On ‘Open Up’ – Mystoria’s centrepiece and stand-out track – Amplifier temporarily discard their heavier blueprint, opting instead for a more reflective form of sonic warfare in which Belamir and Durose’s guitars sparkle and shine over a truly thunderous groove. It is a song that not only affirms Amplifier’s creative versatility but also captures all of the vitality, urgency and sheer immediacy afforded Mysteria by its restrictive recording process.
[Rating:3.5]
Mystoria is released in Europe on 8th September 2014 through Superball Records
