Review & Full Album Premiere: Cities of Mars, Cities of Mars
[Click play above to stream Cities of Mars’ self-titled album in full. It’s out Friday on Ripple Music.]
As regards volume and Cities of Mars‘ third full-length, the correct answer is ‘however much you can give it.’ The latest offering from the Gothenburg three-piece arrives in continued association with Ripple Music as a suitably declarative self-titled, running a confident eight songs and 43 minutes that significantly expand the palette of their prior work while holding true to the central narrative concept embodied in their moniker. The sprawl of their science-fictional Martian underground metropolises is met head-on by their self-recorded tonal spaciousness and largesse, fleshed out with currents of synth and effects and an increased focus on melody in the shared vocals of bassist Daniel Palm and guitarist Christoffer Norén, who share lead duties while drummer Johan Aronstedt — who seems to have come aboard since 2019’s The Horologist (review here) — their arrangements coming into greater depth to match the richness and breadth given to each instrument, which seems to have its own space even as the songs tie together around the foundation of guitar, bass and drums.
We’ve visited some of these places before, but each title on Cities of Mars save for the also-aptly-titled intro “Before the Storm” is given a parenthetical location, and at very least the feeling of place in 12-minute closer “The Black Shard (Bahb-Elon)” rings familiar, as do the core elements of their sound. It’s the manner in which the three-piece have actively progressed and explored their ideas and craft that make the release so stunning.
It’s not necessarily just a question of their having become more melodic — though they have, and tracing back their evolution from 2015’s two-songer Cyclopean Ritual/The Third Eye (review here), their 2016 Celestial Mistress EP (review here), the subsequent 2017 debut LP, Temporal Rifts (review here) and The Horologist, they’ve done so with steady and incremental efforts — but the atmosphere across Cities of Mars is broader, drawing from modern progressive heavy in the uptempo shove of “A Dawn of No Light (Chthon)” and delivering that with an undercurrent of crush-based groove as if to remind that even as they gallop, they’re still kin to the likes of fellow Göteborgers Domkraft and Monolord, both of whom have also moved outward from their more straight-up stylistic foundations.
Post-intro lead cut “Towering Graves (Osmos)” is huge and self-aware in kind, a patient, cavernous, lurching dirge that smoothly emerges from the synth drone of “Before the Storm,” and almost immediately, Cities of Mars signal to their audience their increased range and their mastery of nod. Aronstedt hits hard and brings a sense of lumber following the quiet break in “The Prophet (Methusalem)” that’s a willful slog and especially with Palm and Norén sharing vocals over it, feels like a payoff even before the actual payoff, further evidence of just how dug-in Cities of Mars get coming with the immersive movement across that seven-minute track, dynamic in its changes but working according to a master plan that is loyal to the concept of the album as a whole and which very much feeds into that flow. And the overarching affect is huge.
Of course, conveying “big” sound is nothing new for Cities of Mars, but what feels most crucial to understand about the self-titled is that they’re working in three dimensions more than ever before. You can feel the width and the height, the depth of “The Dreaming Sky (Anur)” as the guitars go high and airy and the bass goes low and dirty and both are right up front in the mix paced by the drums and ready with a gut-punch of a chug for the chorus. That track and the aforementioned “A Dawn of No Light (Chthon)” follow behind the acoustic-based “Song of a Distant Earth (Hathra),” in which the vocal harmonies become a focal point in sweet, folkish arrangement and in under three minutes, Cities of Mars essentially redefine the scope of who they are as a band.
“Song of a Distant Earth (Hathra)” is not an interlude, and it’s not something they would’ve done in 2017, or even 2019, and if it’s a result of being restricted from playing live as much as they otherwise may have over the last couple years, the transition into the Baroness-style rush of “A Dawn of No Light (Chthon)” can only be called a fair trade for the proggier turn and the attention to detail in their delivery. The penultimate and somewhat longer at 3:49 “Reflected Skyline (Sarraqum)” is likewise subdued, but this back and forth movement, pushing, pulling and careening and stomping all the while is fluid. Not that Cities of Mars was necessarily written as a single piece — I don’t know that it wasn’t, but the songs have identities of their own — but there was very clearly care put into how the band would tell the stories in addition to the stories being told.
Less directly folk in its cadence, “Reflected Skyline (Sarraqum)” is more daring vocally than “Song of a Distant Earth (Hathra),” but it works, and when the cymbal wash and lead guitar announce the arrival of “The Black Shard (Bahb-Elon),” a patient intro unfurls over the next two and a half minutes until the first verse takes flight. The song recedes for a moment but comes back and is angular and vast and melodic and crunching at the same time and I suppose in that, and in its classic-style solo at the 10-minute mark to finish out in the remaining time, it’s a fitting summary of the album as a whole. They end with an almost sudden coming apart.
Perhaps that’s the transmission from the ancient satellite cutting out, or maybe they just pushed it as far as they could go. Given everything up to that point, it’s believable. Whatever the circumstances behind the manner in which Cities of Mars manifested these shifts in approach on this album, one can’t help but view Cities of Mars as the record they’ve been moving toward over the last seven-plus years, and the fact that it’s self-titled reinforces that notion. If this is the band stating outright that they’ve found themselves in these songs and in these somewhat opaque but engaging lyrical tales — concept has never trumped songwriting for them and it doesn’t here either — then their statement resonates accordingly, echoing through space, back to this distant earth.
