Perfect Storm was founded in Groningen, Netherlands, a country with a proud history of progressive music, mainly the vision of guitarist & songwriter, Gert-Jan Schurer.
The sextet is completed by Adel Saflou on vocals, guitars; Wieger Dijkstra, drums; Jan Munnik on vocals & keyboards; David Klompmakers plays bass guitar; and Hiske Oosterwijk vocals and lyrics.
Their debut, No Air, was released in 2021, and now, three years later, we have the sophomore release, Stairs. Prior to the release, the band released a trailer video, so let’s look at this embedded below, first.
I think the best way I can describe this music is cinematic in scope and execution. There are some blistering passages countered by some of the gentlest melodies you will hear, but whatever the tempo or mood, the sound totally fills the room, and credit must be given to the chaps on the knob duties, namely Niels Voskuil – mix; Frans Vollink – mastering; and Ralph Fokkema – engineer.
The album is available via the band’s Bandcamp page at https://perfectstormsounds.bandcamp.com/album/stairs and comes highly recommended.
We have seven tracks to dissect and enjoy, so here goes.
Opener is Demon’s Dance, and you are hit immediately with some crunching and satisfying riffs and hard vocal melodies, all interspersed with dreamy segments therein. I like the vocal harmonies created by two vocalists clearly with great talent, Saflou & Oosterwijk, the former, incidentally, one of a growing number of progressive talents from a part of the world not traditionally associated with the genre. We are truly a worldwide movement. The mid-passage guitar solo is nicely emotional. A very solid start to proceedings.
This is followed by Skin Deep Sky, and we have a video of this to embed. Dijkstra in particular shines on this track, the drums at the forefront of a melodic rock delight alongside a pulsating bassline provided by Klompmakers. Saflou provides the lead vocals, but Oosterwijk gives us a wonderful harmonic backdrop to this in a song I think deserves wide airplay. Three minutes in, we get a gorgeous orchestral interlude before the guitar introduces a fascinating interplay between riffs and laid-back instrumentation before the heavier stuff gains a final, and soaring, ascendency moving into the closing passage. A song I feel is all about a quest for self and truth, it is a favourite of 2024.
Next up is Don’t Go. Oosterwijk takes over lead vocal duties in what can best be described as a post rock core underpinning a piece examining the urge to hide, perhaps from modern society or a situation. This is a very catchy track which, again, should play well on commercial rock radio stations, and we get Munnik shining here for the first time with a swirling key lead before a classy frenetic denouement, the final seconds featuring a sort of modern take on Floydian psych rock, ghostly guitars and a drum riff Mason himself would have been proud of measuring out the closing beats.
I Am Tomorrow has another video I have embedded below, and this has a spacey feel to the opening bars before settling into something more recognisable as a classic rock infused track with some commercial sensibilities. The guitar leads are very good on this, a song which races along very nicely. The mood and tempo changes two minutes from the end, with gorgeous melodies overlaying the repetitive female voice before we get another supreme and emotionally understated guitar solo very well performed leading into the room-filling close, the sound hitting the walls around you.
Misspend is up next, which has some lovely spartan drum work at the beginning, the keys providing for a ghostly layer over the guitars and bass riffs, which then explode nicely. When the vocals come in, again having lovely harmonies, the track takes on more of an ethereal quality, all the while those drums at the heart of it (Dijkstra is a real find for me this year). Readers of a certain vintage in the UK, incidentally, hearing this will know what I mean when I say that some of the riffs are reminiscent of a rock version of the classic kid’s TV series, Jackanory. There is some interesting acapella in this as well, whilst the final minute of vocalisation leading the guitar, drums, and pretty effects is staggering.
The title track is next, and I played this recently on Progzilla Radio, and there is a final video embedded for you to enjoy. Dreamy, psych-infused melodies and vocals fill the senses in a song I take as a statement of hope for the future. The guitar solo accompanying the scream is very strong, albeit brief, before we get a gorgeous interlude presaging powerful riffs playing off melodic moments featuring some fusion influenced spartan keyboard work before the senses are again filled with sound, a classic close.
Depraved Mind finishes the album off, and it is of epic length over eleven minutes long. This piece brings together everything on the album very nicely, so those huge riffs, melodious vocals, harmonies, swirling keys, deep guitar solos, all underpinned by such a powerful rhythm underbelly, and vocally this strikes me as an examination of how the darker side of our nature has perhaps won the battle or internal examination of the preceding pieces. With the harmonies, there is more than a hint of the type of vocal work Chris Squire was so effective at with Yes. The quieter mid-passage is interesting and the word cinematic is very appropriate, something grand and better witnessed in the open with the volume and system turned to its maximum potential, because the riffs and effects in here are sweeping, especially when the chanting returns, the feel of the middle east infusing your mind. Yet another contender for this website’s epic of the year award, a song which is impossible to put on in the background, as it were, everything building to a thoughtful, intense, disturbing conclusion. As the band themselves say, resistance is impossible!
Stairs is a quality album from a quality outfit and is guaranteed to please those of you who enjoy quality progressive rock with just that bit of an edge to it.