Sometimes more really is more. When Metalycee were founded, it was essentially an extension of Armin Steiner and Nik Hummer’s sound work activities under the name of THILGES3 into harsher territory. A solid six years after their first recording sessions, the project has grown into a five-man army with the simple yet ardent desire to acoustically blow their audiences away. With this recent 12’’ under their belt, succeeding in that aim should turn out easier than expected.

Thanks to the inclusion of a complete rhythm section already, with Bernhard Breuer on drums and Matija Schellander on Bass, the group has edged much closer to Metal than ever before. Add to that the adjuratory spoken word contributions of Melita Jurisic, sometimes looped into broodingly hypnotic cycles and you have a classic band constellation, which enables Metalycee to subversively discourse with audiences all to often treated to endless repetitions of the same formula.

As you might have gathered, this is anything but their goal. Rather, their sound leans more towards the experimental than towards rock n roll, more towards seismic mantras than towards catchy tunes, more towards textural variation than towards stoic riffing. It is a style which opens up into several directions at the same time and which leaves a lot of options at their fingertips: While they are not exactly trying to charm their way into the hearts of audiences, their powerfully integrative offerings place them at a combustion point of many diverging lines of development.

On the three tracks of this EP, their mission statement turns into very tangible and undeniable music. “Mad Tom Song” thrives on a roughly plucked bass pattern, Breuer’s drums rolling with anticipation, as if accompanying a tightrope act in a circus. After metallic drones have entered the scene, Jurisic vocals protrude to the core of the piece, insinuating instead of screaming, telling of scars from the past instead of horrors to come.

It is a bonedry sound the band develops, a constantly tearing and pulling conglomerate of individual strands, bound together forcefully like the hands of a slave. Contrary to the outings of some of their colleagues, who treat minimalism as an aesthetic principle, Metalycee fill the cravisces of their reduced sound with plentiful layers of ticks, clicks, samples and scratching tones, building an entire world around their drums and bass constructs.

The most alluring result of this approach is ten-minute “Ghostpriest” on the flipside-side. First turning around an axis of cosmic whispers, the piece is concretised by ominous spells, with Jurisc talking about “a crock of dust”, before all hell breaks loose and the band unleash a barking monster of snare blows, paranoid visions and Schellander’s resonant maelstrom.

It may take a couple of listens before these structures really take a hold of you completely, but when they do, their interconnectedness reveals a seductive bond between all tracks here, almost forcing its public to listen to them from beginning to end. The only disadvantage is the shortness of it all. More is more, after all, and at a mere twenty minutes, this release is definitely too little to satisfy one’s hunger completely.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: Metalycee
Homepage: Interstellar Records