I’ve spent most of my life as someone who wasn’t into prog in any way shape or form. For me, prog was always this boring, meandering genre, which way too often got lost in its own tropes and compositions, creating a final product that was always an overcomplicated and tough listen. 2024 has been a tough year for me as a prog hater, as a bunch of good albums of the style have been released: Pallbearer’s beautiful Mind Burns Alive, Ihsahn’s genre-bending self-titled, Borknagar’s beautiful Fall, Alkymist’s incredibly heavy UnnDerr, and my lock for album of the year, my fellow Brazilians, Papangu with Lampião Rei. Now, Italian progressive death metal force Bedsore comes at us with their sophomore release, Dreaming the Strife for Love, which diving headfirst into 70’s prog rock, while still bringing an unparalleled amount of brutality and some intellectuality, basing the album on renaissance-era book Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. This might just be the straw that breaks the metaphorical camel’s back and turns me into a prog fan.
Just to quickly preface this review, I won’t speak much on the lyrical aspects for two reasons: 1. Giulio and Stefano talked extensively about them in their interview with me 2. I don’t speak Italian. I’ll choose to focus more on their sound. For a more in-depth exploration of the lyrics and inspirations behind them, go watch the interview.
The first track, the beautiful instrumental “Minerva’s Obelisque” is a textbook sort of “business card” song, showing exactly what to expect from the coming 40-or-so minutes, some deep, smooth, downright luxurious 70s style progressive rock. Layers and layers of keyboards, beautiful flute melodies and soft, almost jazzy drums are all present here, making for a chill introduction that already gets the listener excited for more, trying to figure out where death metal fits into this already complex equation. “Scars of Light”, recently released as a single, keeps with a similar motif, but the metal finally comes in. A rolling keyboard riff and a wolf-howl start us off, but Jacopo sends out a scream from the depths of his soul, adding a sinister, black metal like flair. This is where the “fun” lies in the record, how they make sinister extreme vocals fit with the prog instrumental, without any of them losing their essence, both being conceptually solid. There are some sections that could fit perfectly as a battle theme in Mario RPG, or something of the like, and I mean that in the best way possible.
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“A Colossus, an Elephant, a Winged Horse; the Dragon Rendezvous” is as epic and complex as the name suggests, and personally, it is the album’s highest high. Clocking in at a mammoth 11, almost 12 minutes, it takes you on a major trip, going from death metal, to a smooth saxophone section (which is incredible, by the way), to atmospheric pads, a deeply emotional, but still appropriately chaotic section at around the 4:30 mark. A few minutes later, some blistering solos come in, culminating in some really old-school death metal double kicks, blast beats and growls, seamlessly going back into an almost medieval melody. You know those playlists on YouTube that are titled like “songs to make you feel like an 18th century victorian-era villain”? This is it. You are a Victorian villain, but dressed in colourful bell bottoms.
The back half starts off with “Realm of Eleuterillide”, which explores the more chaotic side of prog, with some excellent “start-stop” writing, overlaying it with some just brutal drumming and calmer sections. It is just in your face, energetic, until it isn’t, until it is again. Incredible. “Fanfare for a Heartfelt Love” is expectedly grandiose, with some slightly bitcrushed-y synths that can’t help but remind me of golden-age video game music. It has the same heroic quality as the Dragon Quest soundtrack, managing to be incredibly motivating. What really stands out from “Fountain of Venus”, for me, is that back half, with some incredibly smooth prog, some flying solos that have that insane amount of feel 80’s hard rock solos had, and it all fits so perfectly.
Dreaming the Strife for Love doesn’t make sense. At all. It shouldn’t make sense, it shouldn’t fit. Death metal and 70’s style prog rock are basically polar opposites, but it all fits, they make it work, and they make it work as both a prog album, a death metal album and both. It is truly the work of genius, and I say this with no exaggeration at all, the boys at Bedsore are some of the best artists of our generation, and it would be a travesty if their work went largely unnoticed.
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Header image by Francesco Maria Pepe
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[…] 2024 has been quite an eventful year for prog, be it with the releases of incredible album’s such as Ihsahn’s self-titled, Caligula’s Horse’s Charcoal Grace, Job For a Cowboy’s Moon Healer, or even on stage, with Mike Portnoy’s long-awaited return to Dream Theater. Lurking in the depths of the Italian underground, Roman kaleidoscopic death metal outfit Bedsore has been cooking up the sequel to the incredible Hypnagogic Hallucinations (2020) for a while now, resulting in the brilliant Dreaming the Strife for Love, which will be released through 20 Buck Spin later this month (and which is reviewed here). […]