Island

With so much going on, ploughing through Island’s Orakel is more like an exercise in sonic survival than an actual listening experience. This relatively unknown German trio are perhaps best described as an outfit that take early Opeth-sounding mellow passages and fuses them with Mastodon’s slower, grinding movements, with all kinds of devious sounds strewn in between. To put it simply, Island are all over the map. This is one of those records that will evoke polar "what the hell is this crap?” and "this crap is brilliant” reactions. Most listeners who settle on the latter reaction would agree that Orakel is certainly a record that will take a while to digest. With so much going on and so much variation in the ebb and flow, it’s difficult to pin down if it’s actually good or not without spinning it a couple times. The potential is certainly present for this band to rank amongst the atmospheric elite of doom-y, progressive metal (such as Agalloch) but until then, I’ll leave this one up to the listener. Orakel is definitely an experience and should catch the interest of progressive metal fans but the interpretation of the journey is best left unwritten.