EP Review: Stengah - Downward Mechanic
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
French Modern Metallers, Stengah follow up on their debut album, Soma Sema – as well as a slot on the S.O.P.H.I.E. Stage at this year’s Bloodstock festival - with a five-track EP entitled Downward Mechanic. Although stengah refers to any marine creature that stings its victims, a jelly fish, for instance, the first place most of us will go is to the opening track of Meshuggah’s Nothing album. When your band’s name evokes such a thought, you really need the chops to back it up.
Luckily, on the strength of both Soma Sema and the Bloodstock performance, these Lille natives don’t have to worry about that. And this new extended player is a twenty-minute manifesto that Stengah are very much part of the new breed of metal bands.
There is undoubtably a Meshuggah feel to large parts of this record, whether it’s the polyrhythms heard on The Earth Awakens or the vocal lines of Sheltered Within, you can’t get away from the Swede’s influence on this band. But to call them a sound-a-like would be doing Stengah a huge disservice.
The Earth Awakes is constructed around complex riffs and tempo switches, destructive guitars become soaring astral compositions within a heartbeat. The six-string work of Maxime Delassus and Alex Orta is breathtaking at times and leads the way for vocalist Nicolas Queste to follow a similar, multi-faceted path
Sheltered Within sees rhythm section of Benoit Creteur and drummer Eliott Williame earning their corn as they keep the low end big and heavy, anchoring the music to the ground.
Reign of an Apocryph and closer Inner Space don’t shy away from the polyrhythmic feel but display a more Gaelic sound; its Jazz-infused chaos is reminiscent of what might happen if Gojira and Slipknot collaborated. Reign… features a delicate guitar interlude which leads into a brutally beautiful section where the kick-drum dominates. Inner Space sees the choppy riffs taking on an epic scope, even verging on the post-hardcore at times.
Yet, if we look away from the band’s name’s Meshuggah connection and consideri its zoological reference, the amorphous nature of the jelly fish can be seen to be reflected in the music of Stengah. From polyrhythms to more classical sounding time signatures, or from glorious vistas to microscopic analysis, Downward Mechanic has it covered.
Strangely, it’s the acoustic moments that stand out as being the most unsettling. And none more than the seventy-eight second central song, Resurface, a folksy number closer to Led Zeppelin III than Nothing.
Downward Mechanic might be short, but it is full of complex ideas that are bound to bamboozle and entertain until the new album is finished. Expect to be seeing much, much more of this band over the next few years.
