Feather Mountain – To Exit a Maelstrom, 2022, 🇩🇰
Feather Mountain is a band that comes to us from Copenhagen, Denmark. The band was founded by two brothers Andreas (bass and growl/backing vocal) and Christian (drums) alongside Mikkel (vocals) in 2017 while Jens (guitar and backing vocal) completed the line-up in 2018. After completing the lineup of the band in 2019, they released their first album "Nidus", which presented progressive mix of hard rock and modern metal as well as fresh alternative rock. Interesting and excellent debut.
After being contacted by the band, I was given the great honor to present to you their new work ‘To Exit a Maelstrom’ , which will see the light of day in about a month.
The album is very different from its predecessor. During the writing and recording of this work, the father of the band's founders unfortunately fell ill with Alzheimer's disease, and this fact made the band change its style and release a thematic album that relates to, as the band wrote: "‘To Exit A Maelstrom’ thematizes the loss of a close family member to a disease, which as Alzheimers slowly dissolves a human being, its personality, memories and language and ultimately transforms the familiar into something alien. As the album title suggests, the illness can be perceived as being caught in a maelstrom, where one is swallowed by unrejectable, external incoming circumstances beyond personal control finally leading you to drown and be devoured by the chaos.”
So it's not an easy topic at all, but in addition to what is written above, the band wants to show the side of relatives who also deal with it through their lyrics and music.
The music breathes darkness into the soundscape , and throughout the album the atmosphere is really tense. The musical concept goes from fragile, “sensitive” pieces to intense, highly rhythmic choruses.
Big part of the album are the vocals and they are fantastic, they really convey every emotion perfectly, moments of melancholy accompanied by clean vocals, and moments of anger and I can say disbelief with harsh vocals. In fact, in every moment the emotion is conveyed in a way that shakes or disturbs you.