:: Five Star Prison Cell - Matriarch

Five Star Prison Cell

Melbourne based outfit Five Star Prison Cell’s 2005 debut release ‘The Complete First Season’ was a stunning display of the members chaotic technical metal skills, and an album that defied many expectations. On their follow up release ‘Slaves Of Virgo’ in 2007, Five Star Prison Cell took the template of their debut and pushed their sound to even further extremes, making it both a challenging listen, and one extreme sounding album. But despite upping the ante, the album did have many struggling to find any real sense of hook or melody to latch onto throughout the album, which meant that while the album did receive some high praise, it also managed to produce its fair share of critics as well.

Now returning with their all important third release ‘Matriarch’, Five Star Prison Cell have finally managed to produce an album that balances their trademark technical math-metal like edge with their often overlooked melodic tendencies. And it goes without saying that with ‘Matriarch’, the band has well and truly crafted their finest album to date. The opening track ‘I Curse This Vessel’ begins in an uncharacteristically melodic manner, with Glynn’s off kilter vocals and the slower riffs providing listeners with something to grab onto. But despite the subdued intro, the song soon takes off into heavier territory, with the laid back riff section increasingly moving into more jagged tempos, and Glynn’s vocals taking on a savage tone with each new line. The melodies do manage to stick around long enough to give the song a real sense of character, but not at the cost of the band’s demonstrated technical prowess, which sees them continually changing the tempo and feel of the song with frequency throughout its duration.
The blisteringly fast paced ‘Book Of The New Sun’ sees the band venture into a sound that comes as close to grindcore with melody as you can get, while the relentless drumming and guitar patterns heard throughout ‘Empire Made Flesh’ and the groove based ‘Airsharks’ are a couple of tracks on the album that actually adhere to a more traditional song writing structure, if of course the likes of Meshuggah’s output is the definition of simplified and formula like. The strangely hypnotic ‘Swarm’ is a definite stand out on the album with Glynn actually utilising his vocals in a more melodic and restrained manner to give the song a genuine sing-a-long like chorus, even if the song does end on a far heavier direction than the one it started out on, while the short ‘Modus Operandi’ and ‘Buttercup’ are purely chaotic metallic assaults of sheer noise. The post-hardcore experimental piece ‘Paramountain’ and the equally expansive ‘Loss Of Gravitas’ gives the album some much needed breathing space around the middle, before the jazz tinged ‘Forlorn’, the calculated metallic aggression of ‘Dance Of Shiva’ and the totally unhinged mayhem of ‘Lamia’ bring the album to climatic close. Five Star Prison Cell have managed to produce a body of work that ventures beyond the sound of their earlier releases without compromising on their original musical vision. Needless to say, if you were a fan of the band’s previous efforts, ‘Matriarch’ is a definite must have release.