Arphael Argenesis

Ukrainian One-Man Progressive / Atmospheric / Math Metal.

Now what does Arphael do? That’s really hard to articulate. It’s technical death metal, it’s djent, it’s industrial, it’s garage black metal cheesy cheap keyboards and vocals buried in the mix. The ultimate sound is otherworldly, alien, and completely disorienting, especially since the song-writing takes a tech-death leaning of lots of sections and lots of tempo changes. It’s also completely unrelenting. There isn’t a whole lot of breathing room in the hour or more’s worth of music; for some, listening to Arphael will be a genuinely exhausting endeavor.

It’s all about fretboard wizardry, an astounding showcase of the usage of an eight-string guitar’s range, punchy dimension-warping grooves, meteor-shattering machine-gun stops and starts, and ethereal keyboard work that is always there hanging over everything. I’ve described sounds by bands before as being dimension-shattering and galaxy-warping (and using other kinds of hyperbolic silly shit), but Arphael is the real deal and warrants the hyperbole.