Sinch take a look back for forward refection

An overcast morning is promised to transform into a scorcher of a day, says the babe-of-a-forecaster. (Have you noticed how all weather-females deliver it as if it were instructions for a latest addition to the ‘Kama Sutra’?) There is an easy way to escape into a dark, heavy, humid climate that will exhaust your body far from any need for microwaving it with cancerous rays: draw the curtains and slip in…

‘Sinch’, an album by a quintet from Eastern Pennsylvania. Sinch are heavy-sounding but this is not conveyor-belt metal: it is as wide as a US highway to allow unlikely vehicles: non-HM instrumentation, arrangements that almost go ‘progy’ but refrain from being just recycling of old ideas by distancing itself from borrowing-without-frontiers, being an imitation that is simply designed to jump on the last carriage of the (already) departing bandwagon.

It is easy to spot the reference points, such as Tool, Alice In Chains and Nine Inch Nails, but also injected in the ‘cure’ for workaday metallers are newer sonic solutions of Radiohead, Björk, The Prodigy and At The Drive-In. Singer Jamie Stem, guitarist Tony Lannutti, bassist Mike Abramson and drummer Dan McFarland formed the band at the end of high school, in 1994, that was followed by a series of full-lengths and EP releases over the following 6 years until the day they met Jay Smith and his spectacular machine.

Called the ‘Ocular Noise Machine’, it’s been designed (and patented) by performance artist Smith and, although played like a guitar, it functions as an interactive video manipulation device producing an array of visual delights that move within the rhythms and beats of the bands musical performance. This sound’n’vision combo helped the band secure an indie/major contract with Roadrunner and Universal, respectively.

The album is strangely sequenced with heavier, punchier and meatier tracks at the beginning and (somewhat) at the end, probably best represented by a power-song ‘Tabula Rasa’; its title means ‘a clean slate’ but applied to humans it denotes an ‘empty’ mind, like a baby or Jade’s from ‘BB3’, but the song is as loaded as any man. ‘Passive Resistor’ rocks fully before we descend into troubled emotional waters of ‘The Artic Ocean’, ‘Seven’, ‘Plasma’, and then return to harder complexity with ‘The Silent Acquiescence Of Millions’.

The intensity of pieces is not here only to overload (y)our senses but allows room to spread a spell, to grab one’s attention in a hypnotic way, it magics it onto the ‘lost highway’… Instances of heaviness are not as heavy but the moments of mellowness are not too emotional. The band has found a good balance between intensely loud and intensely ‘internal’… No surprise the frontman Stem claims this to be “emotional rock… whatever comes to us comes in the moment of creation, it’s all about the moment.”

The moment of ‘heavy-art-rock’; treasure it. This could well be the beginning of a great ‘friendship’ as I’ve not heard anything so mesmerising (of this kind) since… the current Jerry Cantrell’s album.

7.6/10