I'm not quite sure how 3-song demo Voyage from Polish Esotherisst ended up in my Inbox, but I know full well it took me a lot of effort trying to track any information on the band, to at least get a cover art picture for this review. Listening to the demo, however, was a much easier experience than searching for the aforementioned info, since Esotherisst are playing rather pleasant, not too abstruse or arcane version of progressive metal.

Tracks You Have Never and How to Fly present very smooth flowing melodies with tight rhythmic riffs behind them. There is nice guitar picked solo in You Have Never and keyboards passage in How to Fly sounds very jazzy, although Roland can never become saxophone. While melodically Esotherisst is almost always pretty sharp, and in that way they sound quite a bit like Haken, their male vocalist Krzystof’s voice can be somewhat too soft and androgynous, perhaps because it is buried down in the mix. While this approach is a distraction on You Have Never, the first 2-3 minutes of such soft singing on How to Fly make that composition sound very soulful and penetrating, before the middle instrumental part picks up in terms of density and tempo.

In Winter’s Arms takes on a different tone. It wants to combine dramatic opening and closure with the laid back middle. Perhaps because laid back in Esotherisst hands becomes somewhat meandering and losing purpose, the two sides of In Winter’s Arms are too dissimilar and the song loses focus and coherence.

In a short span of a three track demo Esotherisst manage to showcase themselves as good instrumentalists with a strong sense of melody and direction, most of the time anyway. That is how I like progressive metal, so my impression from the demo was nothing but favorable.