Save Us From The Archon – “Melancholia” [Album Review]

The new full-length by Pittsburgh-brewed Save Us From The Archon is an instrumental tour de force that knocks the listener on their ass before it soothes. This cycle continues throughout the album until the listener is entirely spent by their final track. The sheer speed and bubbling ferocity that greets the listener once the album kicks into action in the second track on “Within Walls” is intoxicating.

Clearly, this is a group that is comfortable with time changes and jazz-like arrangements melding post-hardcore and extreme metal and shoegaze, without feeling the necessity to bring vocals into the picture. Instead, the guitars float in and out with reveries and delightful sonic overtures before crashing back on the sordid sonic shore of harsh reality. It’s Explosions In The Sky, if they were an extreme speed metal band.

It’s a poetic album, concerned at once with the savage and the serene, the beatific and the darkness of noise and sound. The clash between the two is tempered by the shifts in tone that mark the abrupt leaps in and out of the signature sugar-rush pacing that is as technically impressive as it is aurally engaging.

It’s a pleasure to put something on that breathes in and out like the album does, releasing ferocious blasts of hyper extreme virtuoso playing, before folding in on itself in a dreamlike trance. While it does on first listen does little to distinguish songs, fans of the fast will be pleased to add this to their rotation as it will sink its teeth in when given time. This album shreds and also emotes without relying on lyrical content, which is quite impressive, and earns our nod for its prowess and power.

Melancholia Track Listing:

01. All I Want Is Sleep
02. Within Walls
03. Thread Between
04. Trancing Nostalgia
05. All I Want Is Light
06. Of Forgiveness
07. Until We Unfold
08. To Find Clarity
09. Lost In A Reverie
10. All I Want Is Endless

Run Time: 30:59
Release Date: August 18, 2017

Check out the band’s video for the song “Lost In A Reverie”