Here’s a thought: whatever you think you’re too good for, stuff it. Nobody on this wet rock called Earth is better than anybody else. Life swarms and stumps and squirms where it must; death equalizes. Have you ever found yourself guzzling down a 3-pound bag of candy in an ecstatic fugue state? When you find your face, dappled with confectioners sugar and streaked with red 40 dye, don’t give in to the pangs of disgust and self-loathing. Instead, think of the noble apes from which you descended through the ages. Picture their discovery of the coconut, the pomegranate, the nectarine. That blast of sugar was an evolutionary goldmine, of which you – you beautiful, perfect slob – are the benefactor.
Here’s where I’m trying to go with this: Beyond the Aeons is the debut album from Finland’s Octoploid, a solo project from Amorphis bassist Olli-Pekka Laine, and with its fastidiously taut crunch and melodicism, it hits the bloodstream like that same primordial sugar-rush. Do you need it to do more than that? Take a hike, Ike. Do you think enjoying things because of how purely good they sound is base and pedestrian? Go jump in a lake, Jake. (Finland has many.)
Although billed as Laine’s solo project, given how the band draws from a long roster of Laine’s past and current collaborators, Octoploid has the warm, conversational feeling of a family affair. Drums are handled by Mikko Pietinen, Laine’s bandmate in the stoner act Mannhai, while keyboards are done primarily by Laine’s former bandmate in Amorphis, Kim Rantala (with additional guest keys from Kasper Mårtenson, Laine’s former Amorphis and Barren Earth bandmate). Rather than a single vocalist, Beyond the Aeons rotates lead vocals between Mikko Kotamäki (Swallow the Sun), Tomi Koivusaari (Amorphis), Tomi Joutsen (Amorphis), Jani Muurinen (Xysma), Petri Eskelinen (Rapture), and Jón Aldará (Barren Earth/Hamferð).
Octoploid’s music is a snappy, intensely melodic form of proggy death metal that should come as no surprise with a passing familiarity with Amorphis. Pietinen’s drums are tasteful and mostly restrained, providing a sturdy open launchpad for the melodic flights of fancy from the other players. Although Octoploid is led by a bassist, the songs never become hyperactive bottom-end indulgences such that you might mistake the band for Tales from the Thousand Lakes as played by Les Claypool.
Laine’s bass is always active but never overbearing, mixed cleanly alongside Peter Salonen’s reedy guitar lines. In fact, the bass moves easily between doubling the syncopation of the drums and providing a tandem lead line beneath the guitar (see “Coast of the Drowned Sailor” for a fluid demonstration of both of these modes). Rantala’s keyboards offer a ton of variety across the album, moving from overtly proggy Hammond and Moog tones to sitar and cleaner, understated piano-like sounds.
Perhaps the most pertinent reference point for Beyond the Aeons is Amorphis’s third album, Elegy. Alongside Esa Holopainen, Laine and Rantala were responsible for much of the songwriting on that album’s bold progression of Amorphis’s sound. While there are influences of all sorts of melodic death metal, prog rock, and psychedelic elements across the album, it’s Elegy’s spirit that looms largest. Take “Shattered Wings,” for example, whose tail-end features beautiful guitar solos trading off over a backdrop of wandering bass, insistent tambourine, and burbling keys. It’s vintage, well… vintage Amorphis prog rock.
Your feelings about Elegy, then, may guide your response to Octoploid. In particular, whether one finds many of the melodies, and the way the keys interact with the guitars, on Beyond the Aeons cozily comforting or suspiciously familiar depends very much on the listener. Here, though, it must be said that this particular fructose-loving ape has never liked Elegy very much. I respect its place in Amorphis’s progression, but it feels too much like a tentative stepping stone on the way to something else. Beyond the Aeons, though, feels like an updated take on a similar style, but that improves on the blueprint in three important ways: it is much tighter, it is heavier, and it contains roughly 50% less patchouli.
Octoploid’s music, for all its manifest strengths, seems to fall out of my head as soon as it’s finished. This might be a miniscule distinction, but these songs seem built out of licks rather than hooks. The album’s forty(ish)* minutes breeze by in large part because it is in almost constant motion, tumbling forwards without circling back, a bit like dropping a piece of driftwood into a strong current. There are beauteous sights along the stony bank, and the driftwood finds its way to the end straight and true. That’s sort of, like, enough, right? I am sorry to still be thinking about apes and evolution, but gosh darn it if your ancestral forebears (foreapes, sorry) wouldn’t have been tickled out of their statuesque gourds to find such a glittering confection as Beyond the Aeons. You are not better than them; you just have the obscene luxury of boredom. Octoploid is a sure salve when you need it, and that’s a gift.
*The digital streaming version of Beyond the Aeons has eight songs, with a ‘radio edit’ version of the closing song “A Dusk of Vex.” Physical versions include the full 7-minute version of “A Dusk of Vex” plus a ninth song. Anybody know if you can fashion a turntable out of a big-ass monolith? Asking for a friend…
