Immersion

Take the enlightened, progressive spirit of a Dream Theater and assault it with the brute death metal savagery of a Dark Tranquillity and you might just find yourself holding a copy of 2012's Immersion, the inaugural album from Germany's Words of Farewell. And you'd consider yourself fortunate to do so, as these easily made comparisons should in no way suggest some sort of unimaginative hack job by the young band, but rather an impressive and highly successful fusion of these two very different musical approaches. After befuddling listeners on first listen with kaleidoscopic complexities, dizzying guitar work, pummeling percussion, and fleet-fingered synthesizers, noteworthy tracks such as "Project: Daybreak," "The Great Escape," and "Sundown Serenade" snap together with the kind of satisfaction typically reserved for completing a Millennium Falcon plastic model kit. Meanwhile, the exceptionally speedy "On Second Thought" and the incrementally melodic, electronics-driven "Sorae" stand at opposite extremes of the band's compositional range; the first by proving that Words of Farewell isn't even operating in top gear most of the time, the second for revealing more experimental doors they've only started to push open. Once they do, there's no telling what will come, as WoF clearly possess both the natural curiosity and instrumental chops to try pretty much anything, and, should they cross the line into clean vocals (here, the closest they come is with a few brief whispers or computer-processed narrations within "End of Transmission," "Vagrant Story," and a few others), they'll prove they're gutsy and crazy enough to be their own band, for sure. However, lets not get ahead of ourselves; Immersion's seemingly endless trans-genre curiosities and technical intricacies should keep listeners busy doing just that - immersing themselves - for quite some time.