Wilderun - Epigone
Century Media
Symphonic / Progressive Metal
10 songs (1:06:35)
Release year: 2022
Century Media
Reviewed by Goat

Hailing from Boston and playing a fairly unique mixture of Opeth-style prog and symphonic-drenched melodic death, Wilderun are an easy band to hype up if you've never heard of them. They've been around since 2008 in one form or another and have released four full-length albums to date, only the most recent of which was put out initially on Century Media, showing how hard it can be for even a relative light-sounding metal band to gain fans and make it in any resemblance of a commercial manner! Wilderun have put the grind in to make it to where they are, and Epigone shows them off well if you are a newcomer. It's an airy, grandiose form of metal, starting with a four-minute acoustic clean-sung intro in Exhaler that manages to both relax you and set you up for the oncoming hour-plus album, and if anything you'll wonder why it took this long for a label to snap them up to fill the large, Opeth-shaped hole since Åkerfeldt and chums wandered off with their big book of 70s folk-prog.

As the fourteen-minute Woolgatherer shows, this band puts together the heavy and the light extremely well (on top of vocalist Evan having a slight similarity in clean tones to ol' Mick) with plenty of folksy acoustic strums before launching into a symphonic torrent the equal of plenty of atmospheric black metal bands. It's very pleasant even at its heaviest, and soon snags your ears and keeps them despite the song length, as does much of the album. Even when not flying off atop the mountains that songs like Passenger conjure up in your mind's eye, the band make for a solid, downright Middle-Eastern tinged vibe like some alt-universe Orphaned Land that invested heavily in glorious choral harmonies. And the songwriting is consistently great, be this whether leaning more towards realms progressive, such as Identifier with its Cynic-esque vocodered vocals and a touch of the avant-garde in the way it shifts from heavy to light. Or the extended Distraction suite which is split across four parts here and leans towards the symphonic elements with an enjoyable touch of Tool-esque alt-rock in part II before the triumphant part III shifts entirely into guitar heroic grandiosity, an extended coda leading into Distraction Nulla with its deranged electronic cacophony and ending the album proper majestically if leaving you wanting more.

This is all, of course, fantastic and reason enough to seek the album out in its own right. Yet those into disparate and progressive music will forgive a side foray into what is ostensibly a bonus track but which demands attention in its own right; a cover of Radiohead's Everything In Its Right Place that not only manages to adequately both reproduce and reimagine the original in symphonic metallic format but also gives extra life and satisfaction to the album in its place at the end of the running time. It's the proverbial cherry on the cake! Undeniably good, Epigone is definitely recommended, although regular readers will forgive this reviewer if he doesn't follow in the steps of a certain other site that has already pronounced it amongst the best of 2022. It might be; but it's far too early to say so at the time of writing! And do check the previous albums out to catch up on an underrated discography.

Killing Songs :
Woolgatherer, Passenger, Distraction II
Goat quoted 87 / 100
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