Farmakon

Farmakon’s debut begins as a pretty straightforward melodic death metal album. Then before two minutes have passed the band tosses in a jazzy funk jam session only to break into ultra-fast death metal once again. Confusion reigns until the ears begin to adjust and expect drastic Mr. Bungle-esque leaps and twists, and eventually it starts to feel like there just aren’t enough of them. Funk aside, A Warm Glimpse owes a great deal to early Opeth — though no song breaks the seven-minute mark many of the clean vocal/quiet acoustic passages resound with Opethian atmosphere. Yet A Warm Glimpse is too uniquely bizarre to be classed as a copycat and too coherent to be written off as unfocussed experimentation. Refreshing and challenging at the same time, A Warm Glimpse could be a marker on a new metal side road.