Progressive Rock

Israel 52mins

The album is self-produced and self-released and available on all streaming platforms.

https://www.mentalfracture.com

https://www.facebook.com/Mentalfracture/

Rating 90/100

It is always a great joy to come across a progressive rock album, emanating from an unknown band that is both interesting and totally absorbing. Normally, instances of coming across such perfectly balanced albums, from a new band, are rare and quite few between. Such cases of achieving, in a debut album, what is complete musical splendour, is often reserved for seasoned musicians who have gravitated together to form a new band.  But, as often is the case, an inaugural album from a new band can be unbalanced and where only an acceptable percentage of the tracks peek at top quality, the rest of the tracks are often quite mediocre. However, ‘Mental Fracture’s’ inaugural album ‘Disaccord’, is a total delight from start to finish. A possible reason, for this state of musical perfection, might be the band’s close association over the past ten years, allowing them to hone and polish their music to a state of utter refinement, certainly a reason why ‘Disaccord’ is such a good album.

The entire programme of nine tracks comprises music that is both well-constructed and lyrically expressive.  It is definitely music that is executed with a real purpose and which voyages seamlessly between passages of both light and shade, vivacity and measured unhurriedness. It is an album throughout where every single segment, of the collective harmonious arrangements, are assembled with care and precession. Clearly, an abundance of rehearsal time has been expended in the studio to perfect the instrumental arrangements which have been so obviously re-worked and honed to attain musical impeccability. Pleasingly too, every track presents, to the listener, a fresh face in which to explore the band’s capabilities. It is music throughout that is simply oozing with myriads of intricate output proliferations, all saturated with an amazing depth of variation and complexity. Arrangements too that incorporate an abundance of subtle time changes together with variations of rhythmical patterns. It is a package of percussive delights plus a deft assortment of instrumental interplay.  The collective tracks, here together, present a complete cocktail of different musical persuasions. Elements of jazz, rock, progressive rock and progressive metal and classical flavourings grace the programme throughout. Superb guitar leads (Yogev Shpilman) and many variations of keyboard (Ori Mazuz) excellence adding a rich progressive rock influence to the album, from the very first track. Both the guitar lead manipulations and the various multi keyboard runs and collective chord adornments suggest a classical music background from these guys that together adds much style and panache to the proceedings. Not to be outdone and certainly contributing greatly to the overall mix is a wonderful percussive section of tuneful bass (Philip Tsukerman) and energetic thoughtful drumming (from Hai Muller)

Especially stunning are the wonderfully executed vocals from ‘Ori Mazuz’, they are delivered with utmost passion, amazing control and projected with beautiful intonation, quite the best (new to the scene)  vocalist around. There is too a poignant story too wrapped in the vocals for the track ‘Concrete Wall’.

Summary: A brilliant album from four very talented musicians, an album that explores the many facets of Progressive Rock with forays into Jazz, metal and other classical avenues.

The Following, With Many Thanks to Ori for supplying me with this early Bio:-

Hey Geoff, thanks for writing me! In 2010 me, Yogev and Hai got together to play in our music school’s cover band. We had a very good chemistry, and at I was experimenting with writing and arranging original music at the time and we really liked bands such as Dream Theater, Opeth and Porcupine Tree, so we thought it would be cool if we had our own prog band! Philip was learning in the same high school with Yogev and Hai so they recruited him to the band. We wrote many songs since we started playing together, but the band was less active at the time because life got in the way. Somehow we managed to stay together to this day. We started recording drums for “The Mind’s Desire” EP in 2014, and since then I was experimenting with music production and mixing. I really liked this filed even though the learning curve is very steep. It took us a while but we finally released our first EP in 2019, which was self produced, mixed and mastered. We did every mistake possible in this EP and I learned a lot in the process. With this knowledge we ventured forth to producing a full length album. Many of the material in this album was originally written in our early days, but we took the time to perfect them and turn them into a coherent story. We started recording last year, then I took the time to mix it to sound the way I imagined it to be. We don’t sound like a modern prog metal band and I really like how it turned out. Yogev mastered the album, so it was self produced through and through.

You can now call each other and see information like Active Status and when you’ve read messages.

Ori

Also, we didn’t study music production anywhere, we taught ourselves by making a lot of mistakes.

ALSO From The Internet:-  Mental Fracture Are A modern progressive rock and metal band based in Israel, Mental Fracture draws inspiration from the music of Dream Theater, Opeth, Porcupine Tree, as well as prog classics such as Camel, King Crimson, and many more. The members of the band wear their influences on their sleeves, playing complex, energetic, and heavy music, never afraid to incorporate a new, different kind of weirdness in their music.

Disaccord The band’s first full-length album, titled Disaccord, was released on March 3rd, 2022. It has been independently produced and was under work for several years. The themes of the songs within revolve around the concepts of cognitive dissonance and the games we play with ourselves to cope with it. The songs in the album vary constantly and change their genre, gliding through jazz, oriental music and synth, yet always staying cantered around fierce, energetic rock and metal.

The Mind’s Desire The band has released a debut EP, “The Mind’s Desire” in February 2019, featuring 5 songs, all of which were recorded and produced independently. Its lyrics take on the concept of creation, and the mind wanting to break free so that it may leave an everlasting mark on this world.