ZOMBI - Spirit Animal
March 30, 2009, 15 years ago
(Relapse)
Taking the one-dimensional horror movie/sci-fi soundtrack as far as it could go over the course of several records, Pittsburgh’s Zombi uses new record Spirit Animal as its vehicle for expansion into the realms of pure prog rock. Now very much in line with classic Genesis, King Crimson, the Clockwork Orange score and some of the neo-prog material found on Magna Carta, Zombi constructs instrumentals that warp perceptions and reveal the vague discomfort of an oddly close dystopic future. Each of these instrumentals is long, which should give you an idea of what you’re getting into: the shortest, ‘Cosmic Powers’, clocks in at 6:47, while ‘Through Time’ is a whopping 17:30, though that’s still considered kind of concise in prog circles. Zombi’s somewhat interesting while the its records play, but after a while this all seems gimmicky and one-dimensional (there’s that term again): I mean, who’s going to listen to this stuff regularly?
