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Frogg – Eclipse Review

By Dolphin Whisperer

It’s a bird! It’s a plane? No! It’s a Frogg! Hailing from the festering urban sprawl of New York City, the upstart amphibian clan skews modern in influence and modernER in attack. Pulling the rip to progressive twist of Between the Buried and Me with the focus of tight structures and virtuosic play, Eclipse as a debut full-length, spins scales and riffs in only the way that a driven tech death band can. In this day and age, of course, tech alone can’t make the only splash. But something’s in the water where Frogg dwells, something laced with all the fidgeting whirr and tongue-out gambol for which a thirsting prog fan could ask.

In sweeping flair and uptempo character, Eclipse displays a corona of youthful exuberance around its core of high-practice death metal. Death metal via aggressive, riff-based drives and scratchy, barked vocals anyway—Frogg does not play the straight and skanky vomitous mosh tunes of olde. Rather, the swamp that Frogg inhabits spews a funk that curls senses around the Cynic-enabled rumblings of Augury or the ever-flowing melody of prime Neuraxis. And though the sounds of heavy chord chugs (“Life Zero”) and tricky-picked sweeps (“Interspecific Hybrid Species”) exist along that thought pattern, in bursts of individuality Frogg tears in equal abandon from ethereal jazz fusion (“Walpurgisnacht”) and metalcore-coded guitar fury (“Double Vision Roll”). Ambient long enough to let its gasping audience realign for another round of progressive tumbling, Eclipse barrels from jumping jack percussive runs to full layout fretboard gymnastics to chirping keys alerts all in a steady and vigorous breath.

Dense and meticulous, and through a love of screeching guitar histrionics and high-spirit guitar and synth work, the splatter of Frogg’s patchwork renders clear as a Klimt through virgin eyes. Despite the seeming excess, founding mind (and primary throat) Sky Moon Clark (The Mantle) and Brett Fairchild, while displaying their talent for hyperspeed, harmonized arpeggio runs (“Dandelion,” “Wake Up,” “Interspecific…”), maintain firm drops back into developed melodies and shrill inclusions—squabbling whammy flutters, clanging pick rakes, harmonic pings—to attach madness to memory. Wearing a strong relative compression,1 layers upon layers of these dancing guitar melodies stack atop pummeling kick runs and sputters, and lockstep counterpoint bass runs,2 to construct a shifting, shuffling mass of amplified chatter that never loses momentum. And with breaks both into hand-percussion and piano-led dance moments (“Walpurgisnacht,” “Wake Up,” “Sun Stealer”), full-blown mosh bridges (“Life Zero,” “Omni Trigger”), and guitar hero antics, keeping the feet and neck and fingers still throughout Eclipse is no easy task.

Though the tech lineage waves proudly in every Frogg leap, an attachment to human touches in production keeps Eclipse from feeling like another sterile outing in the crowded genre. It caught me by surprise the first time I heard “Dandelion,” Its introductory tap-sweep bustling with a clacking dryness that exposed its slight imperfections while creating an allure of reckless speed and challenge. Many look to technical expressions of metal to be effortless, but this particular patina about Frogg’s escalating scale runs, which swirls through screaming, bent peaks and note-stuffed solo explosions, transforms the feeling of étude into an extemporaneous romp. In this playful platform, Pat Metheny-imbued guitar whimsy can crash against glitching djentisms to gentle resolve (“Interspecific…”) or even force an end-of-range guitar squeak to take center stage after an exercise of finger envy (“Sun Stealer”). Boisterous might be the default loudness setting for this kind of saturated work, but in Frogg’s and seasoned engineer Jamie King‘s hands, Eclipse finds wrinkles along its dialed lines.

Yet, Eclipse isn’t perfect. Its extreme dedication to complex construction will pose an issue to the unprepared—digesting this kind of technicality-positioned music is never effortless. The volume of riffage, the speed of every rollicking bar, the force of every abundant fill present loaded and crooked in smile, though the shorter-form execution lowers the threshold for repeated exposure. In a rose-colored vision of what progressive death metal can be, Frogg finds a freedom in fanciful melody, brief poppy breaks, and unrestrained (but not all encompassing) musical showmanship. And if a debut can unwrap as fresh as Eclipse does, Frogg may very well find the world entrapped in their sticky wiles.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 9 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Self Release
Websites: froggofficial.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/froggband | tiktok.com/@froggband3
Releases Worldwide: March 7th, 2025

#2025 #35 #AmericanMetal #Augury #BetweenTheBuriedAndMe #Cynic #Eclipse #Frogg #IndependentRelease #Mar25 #Neuraxis #PatMetheny #ProgressiveDeathMetal #ProgressiveMetal #ProgressiveMetalcore #Review #Reviews #SelfRelease #TechnicalDeathMetal

Synaptic – Enter the Void Review

By Dolphin Whisperer

Nothing marks the passage of time like an album released decades after the core of its sound kicking your brain back to its youth. Now, my birth wasn’t so long ago that I’d consider myself decrepit. But when a band like Synaptic walks The Thin Line Between melodic, technical, and just a touch progressive death metal sound from a pre-Relentless Mutation—hell a pre-Incurso, even—world, I step right back into a mindset of no sweep too repetitive, no riff to crunchy or jagged, and thrashin’ about concerts carefree with no ear protection.1 The fretboard gymnastics across Enter the Void do, after all, possess a youthfulness in the sense that fingers tarnished by the plights of time-based decay could not fathom the nimble taps and extended arpeggiations that adorn its svelte run. Nostalgia alone can’t be the only draw, though.

Having roots in Germany as far back as 2004 under the name Preemptyve Strike, Synaptic’s surviving creative force, guitarist Simon Herbert, has likely lived many of the historical landmarks that adorn the memories of extreme death metal connoisseurs across the past twenty years. As such, a harmonic focus steered by technical riffage and virtuosic bass pops2 breathes the language of the melodically inclined aggression—undervalued acts of olde like Neuraxis or early Arsis. With this kind of construction, the hooks lie just as much in the twisted play of Gothenburg-weight flexing (“The Lost Continent,” “Memories of a Forgotten Future”) as they do in the hypnosis of tapped and layered sonic excess (“Malfunctional Minds,” “City of Glass”). Little new exists in the scale exercises that build tension and escalate song narratives here. Nevertheless, Synaptic finds an entertaining home in their well-carved path.

Though not the most dynamic display of tech death—the compression necessary for these distorted tones to run truer to note against each other makes accomplishing that task difficult, typically—Synaptic defies the tradition of crispy rhythm tones and crack-a-lack drum splatters to wear their chosen style like broken-in denim. In particular den Hertog wears his thick-stringed chatter in frequencies that stray away from competition with treble-loaded taps and blackened tremolo assaults (“Malfunctional Minds” especially), all while stepping with a fretted presence that clangs distinct from a double-kick pummel. Young engineer Ben Jones (also engineer for last year’s Feind album) has reigned in well the diversity of guitar voices that Herbert has chosen allow half-time bridges (“The Lost Continent,” “Architects of the Night”) and long-form excursions (“City of Glass”) to land with high punch and low fatigue. Despite the kitwork being completely at the hands of programming (also Herbert), Jones has integrated its flow well such that it took me exploring the credits to realize the absence of sticks behind the percussion.

Between the extensive and studied scale mastery, progressive breaks into group choruses and verses, and harsh vocal palettes that stay within the genre confines, Synaptic struggles to build a face of their own. It’s a tough gig to carve a niche in this extreme metal world with bands like Archspire driving for harder and harder-to-reach tempos, or others like First Fragment throwing every sticky arpeggio and guitar (and bass) solo imaginable at the wall. Enter the Void subsists on smart composition first, which means that its fugal prowess must hit with a crescendo of excess or hook so mighty it can’t be denied. As it stands, though Herbert’s peaks in solo-land find a more smooth, buttery path to the top. And with three of the eight tracks serving either an introductory of transitory passage (the closer might as well be part of “City of Glass” too), Synaptic spends an unfortunate amount of its rather short run here building an atmosphere whose brightest moments ride low magnitude waves.

As countless other bands have chased this same technical death metal high, Enter the Void too doesn’t enter the scene with any major shake or rattle. Given the level of affection for the style in exposition and careful refinement along the genre playbook, though, it doesn’t seem much like Synaptic aimed to reinvent anything. Of course, a novel approach isn’t necessary to give fans of certain sounds a good time. In Enter the Void, those searching for a snappy, atmospheric play on death metal riffy and sweeping will find plenty of reward.

Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: PCM3
Label: Self Release
Websites: synapticmetal.bandcamp.com | instagram.com/synaptic.techdeath
Releases Worldwide: January 15th, 2025

#2025 #30 #Arsis #DeathMetal #EnterTheVoid #GermanMetal #LifelessChasmRecords #Neuraxis #ProgressiveDeathMetal #Review #Reviews #SpawnOfPossession #Synaptic #TechnicalDeathMetal