Review: Animals as Leaders' self-titled

Tracklisting:
1. Tempting Time
2. Soraya
3. Thoroughly at Home
4. On Impulse
5. Tessitura
6. Behaving Badly
7. The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing
8.  CAFO
9.  Inamorata
10. Point to Point
11. Modern Meat
12. Song of Solomon

Animals as Leaders? Can you name your band worse? It's pretty hard to top this one, but the music of the record is definitely something different. Animals as Leaders is a project of Tosin Abasi's, an American guitar virtuoso. With sound engineer Misha Mansoor (keyboards, drum programming, engineering, production) he has created twelve songs of instrumental music that is really difficult to put into a specific genre. The album blends together elements of metal, jazz, electronic music and various others, all without singing, like said. 

First, I'd like to make something clear: I like this album very much, but putting my finger on the greatness of this record is more difficult. One thing is for sure though. You guitar players will propably enjoy this a lot. Tosin Abasi, as a guitar player, is out of this world. Using 8-string guitars, he manages to master every technique you can possibly think of. Travelling into the album, a lightning-fast sweep picked solo might transform into some weird slapping style thing or beautiful yet chaotic clean part played with fingers. The variation of the sounds is one thing that makes this record so enjoyable.

The songs are all different, but they share a common atmosphere and sound. CAFO is a straight up progressive metal (djent) song with some really cool rythmic patterns and soloing, whereas On Impulse reminds me of classical with it's beautiful guitar passages. The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing includes elements that wouldn't sound out of place on a Pendulum album and Modern Meat reminds me of jazz. I'm by no means an expert of every genre of music (seeing I'm mainly only interested in metal), but these are the things that come to mind.

The most impressive thing though, is that with all these different influences and styles the album still sounds just like that, an album. It's not a collection of songs from various genres, but an entity of its own. Animals as Leaders is a really comforting and relaxing experience. The songs flow together really well and you can't really tell when one song ends and another one starts. With Abasi's exceptional ear for melody the album really starts to grow on you. Although some of the material here (well, most of it actually) is supermega technical guitarwise, the songs are not boring in the slightest. This is also the thing that separates the album from the other guitar-nerd-technical-instrumental things. Just good songs, which, after all, is everything music is about.

I'm not going to give this album full score, cause it's just not memorable or mindblowing enough to earn it. Still, Animals as Leaders is one of the better albums you'll ever hear and particularly suitable for home-alone listening sessions when it's raining outside and you just want to drift away...
92/100