Riverside is back with their first album in nearly five years. After all the change since their last album was released—a pandemic, a new guitar player, political polarization in their homeland—will ID.Entity continue to be aggressively chill or something different?
“I did not know what to expect when I started listening to Riverside’s new album Wasteland. In a way, I was surprised that it was written and released. After Piotr Grudziński’s sudden and untimely death in 2016 the band was effusive in their love for him and open about what a deeply personal loss they had suffered. The three remaining members elected to release a compilation of instrumental material featuring Piotr’s work and songwriting in 2016 entitled Eye of the Soundscape. This was followed by a live album called Lost ‘n’ Found on Bandcamp independently which featured Piotr in a show on the 18th of October, 2015 in the Netherlands. And then, apparently, Riverside began writing new music.” From loss, creation.
Poland’s Riverside should be no stranger to the dedicated reader of these Angry pages. After discovering the band’s Anno Domini High Definition in 2009, Riverside has sneakily become one of the staples of my playlist. I wasn’t completely enamored with Shrine of New Generation Slaves; but its chill, more reflective moments are the ones that I keep coming back to: “The Depth of Self Delusion,” yes, but especially, “We Got Used to Us,” which has a slow groove and a transcendent chorus. Still, SoNGS lacked the punch and progressive drive that ADHD—and the band’s earlier material—had, and landed far more in the territory of post-Marillion prog, without the brooding darkness into which late Gazpacho has wandered recently. SoNGS was, arguably, nothing more or less than a road sign, though, pointing towards 2015’s latest record: Love, Fear and the Time Machine.
Well, everyone else under the sun has been releasing their Top 10 lists, and for those of you faithful readers out there I’m sure you’re also interested in what I’m going to say about the best records of 2009. First, let me say that for the first half of this year I was not indeed Angry Metal Guy, but instead, I was just a normal guy buying my metal and hoping that it was going to be fucking awesome. Now, I’m a bitter critic. As a bitter critic I hear a lot more, but this year has still been characterized by some of the biggest bands on the scene for me. Mainly, Amorphis, who in my opinion have released the finest album of the year, if not the finest album of their very distinguished career. But, let me get to that later. There have been some great records this year, but there has been a lot of mediocre shit. Think of this list as being two-tiered, top 10 and then top 20. The top 10 are the records that I think were really awesome, elite albums, the second 10 are records that I think are great and worth your time and effort. Note that I haven’t heard certain albums that I’d like to hear due to that whole poverty not being offset by stealing music thing. With this, I hope to launch AngryMetalGuy.com into the new year on a new note: one where bands suck less.
