Persefone
Spiritual Migration

There are a couple of things I really can't get my head around when it comes to Persefone. One is their origin being from the 467 square kilometer "large" country in the mountains between Spain and France called Andorra. Now, the number of good music acts or good music at all coming from this country is, as far as I know, absolutely zero. But Persefone is definitely not bad. I haven't heard so much of them before but with this album they really comes alive but that's another thing I don't get my head around with Persefone - their music. What are they actually playing? I guess calling it hard rock would be the best description but what kind of hard rock? Is it death metal? Well, it's at least some kind of extreme metal but then they also have some tracks that just isn't, like the tracks Consciousness part 1 and 2 and then the clearest example in the outro track at the very end which really doesn't remind me of anything in the metal genre - at least not much of what I've heard (and I've heard quite a lot!) - as they go heavy on the key works.

In a way, I think Persefone turns the hard rock genre upside down. Partly because they're actually an interesting music act from this little country in the Pyrenees mountains and partly from the music itself. Some of the songs are instrumental or have long instrumental parts and quite often they dust off the piano and use that in these or some other kind of "un hard rock-ish" sounds. However, most of the music is definitely hard rock and not seldom they sing by growling or screaming and if it's clean vocals they are not the prettiest in the music industry.

The raw mix of hard and soft, heavy and light, pretty and aggressive as well as beautiful and brutal just keeps coming all over this album. The running time is pretty long, well over the hour, but I still don't feel that length in 'Spiritual Migration'. The variation over the 13 tracks of the album makes the running time just fly away - it's so rich and excessive that it's impossible to feel it's dull and repetitive. 'Spiritual Migration' is definitely not like most albums I get, it's lively and has a wavy feel to it - going up and down in intensity all the time, but also in quality. Yes, it's not all the way awesome, sometimes it's really pretty bad but that's the thing with it - it's not only one thing - it's all things. It dares to be that way, dares to show many sides of itself and because of this I feel we have to take a "tour de Spiritual migration" here so you'll see the many sides of it.

The album starts of with Flying Sea Dragons and that's a barely two minutes long instrumental track with lots of electric guitars. The second track is a rocking hard death metal track with angry screaming and really fast blowing drums combined with some fine played keys and guitars. Then we get to the third track, which is pretty similar to the second but here they use clean vocals and a whole lot less aggressiveness. The effect is that the keys and guitars also goes one step further in the fine tuning. The fourth tracks is another instrumental track and gives us birds tweeting, something that sounds like didgeridoo and piano, but also some panpipes until they on the second half of the songs gets a lot heavier with the electric instruments and drums. The fifth track is really hard and aggressive, but also one of the longest tracks on the album and as you probably know very few long tracks have one particular style all the way through and this one is no exception. It changes character throughout and we get to hear everything from sci-fi-ish space sounds to really well played keys and moody guitars except for the heavy stuff that comes and goes over the 519 seconds that this song last.

The middle part of 'Spiritual Migration' is made up by the two tracks called Consciousness part 1 and 2. Both of these tracks are instrumental and shows a side of Persefone that displays their maturity as musicians. They have the courage to really take it all the way with these instrumental songs playing hard, soft, beautiful and so on not only for show but to the full extent. Together they make out nine minutes of this album and these nine minutes really represents all that the album is (except for the vocal part perhaps). They have the well played piano parts, the impressing guitars, the death metal sound that is the foundation of the band when they growl and as actually I'd say it's only Marc Martins aggressive grunting that is missing from these tracks for it to be a miniature version of the album. When the second half begin it does so with Inner Fullness, that kind of compensate for the lack of vocals in the previous songs.

The ninth track is another instrumental track, called Metta meditation, and the tenth is the shortest track of the album that isn't instrumental - instead it's a pretty straight to the point, fast tracks with buzzing guitars that sound pretty similar to a swarming wasp hive before it's rounded off with some sci-fi cave sounds created by the keyboards. The title track comes next and it's another long song, the second longest on the track actually with nearly eight minutes fifty seconds of running time. In the middle of this they do an almost three minutes long electronic piece, even though it starts of as a guitar oriented track and rounds off varying guitars and keyboards doing solos until Marc Martin and Miguel Espinosa gets the last word. This songs stops around an hour after the album started but still we have longest track of the album left, the really epic song Returning To The Source and it's a song that really gives everything for a last time. Here we get guitars going mad, keyboards of all kinds, clean vocals, growling vocals, angry drums and really calm pianos. Speaking of which (the pianos that is) we get an almost four minutes long outro after this nine minutes long track ends that is made up from only piano and this is a surprisingly beautiful track coming from a metal album and the real reason for my puzzled impressions after hearing this album… well that and the fact that these 70 minutes don't feel particularly long after the large variation of things to hear on it.

'Spiritual Migration' may very well be the most varied album of the year and it's definitely a really good one! As I said in the beginning, I haven't had too much to do with this band before but this fourth album is at least a really impressing piece. Well approved!

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