As atmospheric as it is heavy, All Roads Lead Here is the perfect example of an artist who has honed their craft down to a fine art. The release’s centerpiece is the three-part “Möbius”, a trilogy of tracks that is awash with soaring lead lines, Steve Vai-esque keyboard textures and chiming plucked clean guitars.
The EP is like a combination of the work of the aforementioned Vai, Guthrie Govan and Tony MacAlpine, with the modern progressive metal (or dare we say, Djent) sensibilities of bands like Tesseract and Periphery. And obviously Meshuggah, a band who is undoubtedly the most influential act in the current metal-underground.
But All Roads Lead Here is much more than a sum of its parts, and fortunately Ortiz is a strong enough songwriter to make sure that the tracks stay interesting and never descend into boring shred wankery – just check out the intelligent chord changes beneath the main melody lines of opening number “Dark Age of Technology”. Final track “Cloud City” adds another element with slapping bass lines, while Ortiz really cuts loose on his main-instrument by pulling out some serious shred licks and crushing riffs at the tail-end of the tune.
Also, a bonus addition, only available on the vinyl version, is the Supereroremix EP, which features the track “Supererogation” remixed by four times by four different artists. While remixes are usually ill-advised in the metal world, the ones on the bonus release actually work really great and all four reimaginings vary greatly, with Tanuki’s beautifully spaced out and vast take on the track being the highlight.
In a djent/instrumental scene that is becoming more and more diluted every day, Chimp Spanner’s All Roads Lead Here is 25-minute voyage into a world of fresh air. Balancing heaviness and beauty is not an easy task, and the amount of artists who have failed to achieve to this is staggering, but Chimp Spanner’s Paul Ortiz has done just this with ease. A serious musical force to be reckoned with.
(released February 7, 2012 on Basick Records)
