Cea Serin

There is a lot of music around that tries to baffle with bombast and confuse with caterwaul. So called Death Metal and Prog Metal merchants playing their music by numbers and just trying to make a noise in the hope that it will attract some followers who know no better.

Thankfully there are also a few bands who use elements of dark Metal and Prog Metal to create something that actually has musical merit as well as power and darkness.
I hadn’t heard Cea Serin before this album but they are definitely of the latter persuasion. The combination of rhythms and melodies coupled with massively aggressive guitars and growled vocals works brilliantly and actually leaves you breathless with anticipation for the next changes.

The band description of the album runs thus: “This album has been a long time coming. There have been set backs, struggles, and errors. But here we are.
The initial purpose of this release was to be a stop-gap between our debut album,’ …where memories combine…’, and the follow-up album The World Outside. I wanted to bridge the gap between the albums because the two were going to be slightly different. I wanted this album to show the listeners where we came from and where we are going.”
I can see what they are about with the extreme edge material giving way to melody and some sublime playing full of subtlety and expressiveness.

Opening track ‘Holy Mother’ seems to capture it all in a number that is powerful and wickedly fast from the get go but all through the listener can hear different strains impinging into the power and mayhem.
Jay Lamm – bass, all vocals, keyboards, Keith Warman – guitars, additional keyboards and Rory Faciane – drums and percussion make for a massive noise with Faciane’s drums quite awesome and Lamm’s vocals spitting and growling but still you hear the music that lies in the heart of their sound.

By the time you get to ‘Ice’ the change to a keening and heartfelt song is almost shocking but it works and leaves the memory of the song long after it is finished.

‘The Victim Cult’ brings you back to reality with a snap but the album finishes with the magnificent ‘What Falls Away’ -
“What Falls Away” is the last song on the album because I think it really sums up where Cea Serin began as a band (with the death/black and speed metal influences), and leads the listener down this path to where we’re going (with the contemporary instrumental and progressive elements). Most songs boil down to a chorus and how certain musical ideas can both stem from and also lead to that chorus. I wanted this song to have two choruses (for both sides of the story) and really take the time to nurture, explore, and expand on all the ideas that orbit around these choruses.
The story opens up after a funeral. Friends and family gather to mourn the loss of a girl who has taken her own life. As her ever present persona hangs about the linearity of the song we’re left with the parents, capable of reason and the capacity to understand, yet flooded with questions, blame, and doubt - fixated on past events that might explain the present. We’re also left with a boy – a brother and a son – who, due to a mental disorder, is unable to understand the present and why things have changed from the routine. This is their story: people, wrapped up in a defining moment, an ever revolving piece of time, infatuated by the things in life that fall away and oblivious to what remains to stay.”
One of the most affective pieces I’ve heard this year.



I can’t but look forward now to ‘The World Outside’ but this album stands up as a brilliant piece of Prog Metal.