Prime Mover – When Dreams of Death are Euphoric
Release Date: 2015
Label: Self-Released
Review by Tina; Extreme Metal Correspondent
When I was asked to do a write up of the new Prime Mover album for my first Great Southern Brainfart article, I must admit I was a little nervous. Being relatively new to the Atlanta metal scene, I can’t say I’d heard much of the local group before. So far, my experiences in Atlanta have been with thrash and death metal bands, and I expected one or the other when I clicked play on the Prime Mover EP, When Dreams of Death are Euphoric. What I didn’t expect, however, was the refreshing mix of not only those genres but also elements of black metal, doom, and even hints of prog and hardcore.
The album opens with an ominously sludgey riff, complete with chilling pinch harmonics and a slow, rhythmic beat, only to pick up speed and intensity about one minute into the first song. Almost immediately, the song treks into the blackened death universe, then quickly transitions to a more thrashy feel. I was pleasantly surprised to have my expectations shattered by the album’s title track, which was certainly a welcome introduction to the music of Prime Mover.
The second track, Born of the Storm, follows in the varied footsteps of the first, mixing genres in a consistently impressive fashion, and even including some clean vocals in the chorus. While I am usually skeptical of mixing clean vocals with gutterals or screams, I found Prime Mover’s use of melody and harmony, combined with stylistic mixing that makes the singing into a mood-setting backdrop, the perfect way to once again demolish my expectations for what this album, and metal as a genre, could bring.
If this sounds like it may be too much confusion for one album, take my word for it: it’s not. Each song on the EP is unique from the last, but it isn’t contrived and doesn’t seem to be trying too hard. The songs bring out the best in each genre they touch upon and stray far from the monotony common in many metal tracks released these days. The whole album is consistently inconsistent, yet it doesn’t seem to be overthought; it’s not mixing things up for the sake of being different. Instead, Prime Mover’s musicians draw from their obviously varied influences to craft an album that, to put it simply, just sounds damn good.
I often tire of the anti-metal argument that “all metal sounds the same,” because we metalheads know that sludge and thrash, for example, sound nothing alike. But when you start listening to one subgenre, it’s sometimes true—all too often I find myself unable to discern one song, or one band, from the last. Prime Mover is here to destroy that tedium, one death-sludge-thrash-black-prog metal song at a time. When Dreams of Death Are Euphoric closes on a fast, heavy number, even throwing some southern-metal-sounding riffs into the mix, and when I found myself at the end of the six-song EP, I started it right over again. For those of you who haven’t heard Prime Mover before, now is a good time to start listening. I suspect that if you are a fan of any one of the genres I mentioned above, you’ll enjoy these guys as much as I did.
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