Monolyth – We’ve Caught the Sun

By RingMaster Review on March 26, 2023 • ( 0 )

With a sound seemingly drawing an array of tags, French metallers MONOLYTH have just released their new album, We’ve Caught the Sun. Explore and you will see them described as offering melodic death metal, melodic trash, Grind, metalcore, power metal, progressive death metal and more besides. While we would suggest the first two in the list as a potent clue to the band’s furnace of sound, the suggestions only goes to reveal the richness in flavour and invention it embraces.

Founded in 2006 in Beauvais, MONOLYTH released their debut album; Catch the Sun, the following year with its successor uncaged in 2018, A Bitter End / A Brave New World earning rich praise. To celebrate the 15^th anniversary of that first album though, the band has re-recorded its tracks, bringing new facets and life to the original songs, the fresh breath now announced as We’ve Caught the Sun.

The Neverending Beginning opens the release, harmonic caresses and vocal incantation a warm welcome but a moment soon erupting in a ravening of esurient riffs and rapacious rhythms. That death and thrash forged core of the band’s sound is an open surge but equally the suggestion of further variety as flumes of flavours and vocal dexterity equally erupts. The track proved a striking and seriously stirring proposition as it, unknowingly as we admit we had never heard the original, impressively launched itself to embrace and feed our moment of discovery.

It is also an eventful track, every passing moment providing new twists and adventure, a template as rich within the likes of The Right To Bleed and in turn My Blackest Days. Electro essences light the first in swift time, a beacon within its thunderous tumult with its successor almost maze like within its collusion of voracious intensity, uncompromising trespass and melodic radiance. Like the music, vocals similarly unite extremes in their fertility, both united in a sound which bears familiarity, understandably given the years, bands and releases which followed the original, but resonates with true individuality.

Both the outstanding No Damage, a track maybe more than most defying simplistic tagging with its alt and groove metal inclinations, and Breathe with its nagging riffs and venomously pugilistic rhythms gripped ears and appetite. By the track, the album for us, became more striking and gripping, a thought cemented by the grooved disorientation and harmonically bound unrest that is Insomnia and in turn Wasted with its tempestuous uproar and menacing dispute.

There is a drama and creative agility to each track too which is just as involving and compelling as proven by the final trio of tracks led by the predatory Feed the Light with its eddies of grooves and unrelenting menace. Yet again though melodic incitement only lured the imagination in to the tempest, a trap as able within the psychotically virulent Into Speechlessness and Wallbanger and the equally hellish but skilfully sculpted storm it unleashes.

As we said, not having heard Catch the Sun previously, it is hard to say how much reworking or re-interpreting MONOLYTH has performed within We’ve Caught the Sun but what we know is it is one striking and freshly captivating proposal we keenly recommend.

Caught the Sun is out now under ELLIE PROMOTION and SEASON OF MIST distribution; available @ https://shop.season-of-mist.com/monolyth-we-ve-caught-the-sun-cd-digisleeve and https://monolythfrance.bandcamp.com/album/weve-caught-the-sun