Local Review: Visitors – Blueshift

Visitors

Blueshift

Self-Released

Street: 06.20

Visitors = Deftones + Rush

Rarely does an EP sound so much like a full-fledged album. Musical offerings of such satisfying integrity do not hatch, fully formed, by sheer happenstance. Blueshift combines fist-sized chunks of aboriginal talent with months of coffee-addicted, all-night hunkering sessions, to yield prog metal that feels not heavily labored, but cleanly wrought on every level. In a metal scene encumbered by musical George Foremans, Visitors have diligently trained to flutter about like Ali—less grilling, more drilling.

Blueshift’s sound descends principally from pre-millennial alt-metal. But a full appreciation of the recording, produced by Joel Pack, requires harkening back to classic rock bands whose songs were not merely ponderous and sprawling, but artfully structured, full of instrumental and vocal character, nuance, incidents, reversals, plumage. In today’s prosaic park of bronto-rockers, Visitors—post-flightless birds—take wing and wax into verse, into veritable song. –Brian Kubarycz