Review Summary: O masters of the Universe, won't you please reveal, the secrets of The Octopus, inside me that I feel?
Peaking on a first album is as much a curse as a triumph. With 2004's self-titled debut, Amplifier created an instant modern hard/alt-rock classic, carving out their own niche within the genre of an airy weightlessness injected with head-crushing riffs and showing some promising progressive leanings. However, after 2006's largely unremarkable (yet enjoyable) sophomore
Insider and those familiar problems with record labels, the band decided to disappear for 5 years to prove sceptics wrong by creating a meticulously crafted and self-released rebirth.
And the creature that emerged from the other side of that void is the sprawling, two-hour Octopus.
Amplifier's second peak hits higher than their debut could have dreamed of, reaching into the cosmos to adopt spacey themes and embrace their progressive side to become a fully-fledged prog-rock act, with none of the Octopus' tracks dropping below 5 minutes in length bar the ambient,
On the Run-esque intro.
The Octopus is a success in every which way, the band vastly expanding their sound to give each incredibly talented musician room to breathe, one of the album's six epics "Interstellar" (and one of the best progressive songs to emerge from the last decade) a clear example of this. From the moment the song locks into its main, mind-melting riff after the first minute's hectic intro we are also confronted with Matt Brobin's absurdly time-signatured drumming, absolutely at its best, and one of Neil Mahoney's heavy-as-s*** basslines. Amplifier are an incredibly tight band, and Interstellar's 10 minute and 18 second running time gives them time to revel in this, building to a cosmic burst of a climax after Sel Balamir's told us
"Travelling faster than light / Is the only way to be / And the only possibility / To be truly free."
All this talk of 'taking trips to distant suns' and 'sailing across the universe like a jet black sea' is rife throughout and builds a brilliant image of a planet-sized octopus stretching throughout the galaxy, with "Planet of Insects" featuring
"insects crawling over me / predating on their magic powers / that radiate before their fingers" and "The Wave" having us
climb inside of my time machine / into another dimension.
Balamir's delivery ensures that like good space rock, this is gloriously tongue-in-cheek and part of what you naturally embrace when entering The Octopus. Clearly then, through the band's intentions, we are not just listening to an album but, in no way pretentiously, experiencing a trip through space.
What is a shame is that this is never truly drawn into a concept, with only occasional hints at some kind of 'Octopus' entity such as the lyrics of "Minion's Song" which you'll have read in the summary, and the interesting ambience of track bookends of "Utopian Daydream" and "Embryo". Had a more defined concept been the case, the album may well have hit the fabled 5.0 mark.
The album is far from lacking without this however, as there is not a single song of filler (excluding intro "The Runner", which is probably there just to make the album hit the 2-hour mark) or particularly dissatisfying moment. The 11 minute "Trading Dark Matter On The Stock Exchange" provides a standout among standouts, concluding the first half of the album with a menacing picture of the world overrun by capitalists, the astounding crescendo of Balamir's solo topped by the haunting lyrics of:
When one man bleeds on another man’s throne
And one man reaps what another has sown
On unknown seas
Would the business sink you down
Down to an all time low?
Following this and introducing the second half is the captivating "The Sick Rose", lyrics of which are taken from the William Blake poem. The song contains one of Amplifier's best riffs, up there with Interstellar and The Consultancy and also is one of their most progressive songs, featuring a second half that can only described as 'hard riffage'.
Balamir's guitar has become the key focus of the music, drawing the band away from their more conventional verse/chorus/verse roots, though they are still prone to repeating sections of their music, especially on shorter tracks such as "Interglacial Spell" and "Golden Ratio" which do not suffer due to the excellence of the instrumentation.
However, there are moments when songs
almost become repetitive, notably the title track which builds up to an earth-shatteringly heavy middle section, only to repeat the first half of the song after, and "Fall of the Empire" which would have benefited from a tad more variation, being so long.
These are minor criticisms though, and the album's diversity found in some of the band's most mellow tracks "White Horses At Sea" and "Oscar Night" counteracts them. The latter is unusual for Amplifier's usual heaviness being an acoustic-led song, once again showing hate for commercialism with eerie lyrics
"The engineering of consent, and America for Americans... / ...Death to Hollywood..."
It's a cliché I know, but as they say, save the best till last.
The final track,
Forever and More is the most impressive nine minutes of music the band have ever put out, and an incredible way to close an album. From the immense image created by its lyrics -
"I came alive in a burst of heavenly light / Climbed up the ropes to the stars / Cascaded in their fiery blast / Lost in the vast wilderness, drifting and alone" - to the colossal walls of guitar that give Amplifier their name and the second half that drops to a tranquil pace, with a soft bassline that builds and
builds to a final explosion of sound and then fades into silence, a flawless way of encapsulating everything that makes this album so breathtaking.
