Dear B.G.M. Readers,
I feel I like I have to be honest with you. For the most part you are nameless and faceless to me (which does make me a bit sad honestly), but I still feel a need to be very upfront with you and let you know that before I listened to this album I had never even heard of Russian Circles. If you had mentioned the name to me I would have thought it was some kind of Cold-War era dance move that was created to ensure everyone attending a USSR party had the same amount of dancing fun as everyone else. I now know that is not the case.
I now know that Russian Circles are a band. A band who plays gritty, menacing, beautiful and melodic metal with no vocals. They are a bit like Animals As Leaders (with less extreme shredding) and their music carries that same heaviness that floats effortlessly on a cloud of amazingly technical instrumentation. Having not been a long time fan I can’t really tell you precisely how it stacks up against all of their other albums, but having recently fallen in love with this band and having listened through their previous albums many times in the past couple weeks I feel that Memorial feels like a wonderful natural progression for this band.
From beginning to end Memorial is an adventure to listen to and in no way at all do I miss the lack of vocals, which is something that often happens with most instrumental bands who seem like they write their songs to have vocals and then just don’t bother tracking down a singer. In essence that is where the magic with bands like Animals As Leaders, Explosions In The Sky, and especially Russian Circles comes from. They create music that is 100% complete without the addition of a vocalist.
Without a doubt “1777” and “Burial” are my favorite tracks and if you’re sitting on the fence about giving these guys a go you should listen to these two songs first. They are just plain brilliant, but then there is the rest of the album which is also very very good. Songs like “Deficit”, “Lebaron”, and the album’s namesake “Memorial” (which features Sargent House label mate Chelsea Wolfe) are amazing and the blending of Wolfe’s vocals on the title track shows that Russian Circles do actually know how to blend in vocals with their carefully crafted music in a way that is in sync with the flow of the album. Basically what I’m trying to say is that this is some good shit and you should stop reading my words and start listening to this album.
Rating: 5/5
http://russiancirclesband.com/
For more on the making of Memorial, here’s our interview with Russian Circles’ bass player Brian Cook.