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AFFLICTED  Prodigal Sun  CD   (Metal Mind)   15.98
Prodigal Sun IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

��� Just grabbed some of the last available copies of this older 2008 reissue of Afflicted's debut album Prodigal Sun, one of the more obscure prog-death albums that came out in the early 90s. Originally released on Nuclear Blast back in 1992, this latest version of the album was re-mastered and reissued by Metal Mind on a gold disc CD in a machine-numbered digipack edition of two thousand copies, with an eight-page booklet and new liner notes. It was another one of those albums that I first heard about while reading Jeff Wagner's avant-metal bible Mean Deviation; while Afflicted is only briefly mentioned in the book, Wagner's description of Prodigal Sun as "...a psychedelic wreck of brutality mixed with Eastern/Indian melodies, cosmic atmosphere, and passages of triumphant traditional metal..." was enough to put 'em on my list of albums to track down.

��� Despite being recorded at the legendary Sunlight Studios and coming from Sweden, Prodigal Sun was far from another bout of Entombed-cloned death metal; hell, even the photo of the band in the booklet makes 'em look more like Ozric Tentacles than a crypt-smashing Swedish death metal outfit. It's that quirkiness that's drawn a cult following amongst aficionados of oddball prog-death, and the strange, aggressive sound on this album really stands out from the predominant early 90s death metal. Right off the bat, Afflicted are going for a different sort of vibe, opening the disc with the droning buzz of an Indian raga and swells of eerie synth, but when first song "Harbouring The Soul" finally kicks in, these guys deliver an offbeat, spacey brand of death/thrash that gets pretty brain-warping. The songs are mostly fast-paced blasts of proggy death metal with lots of fx-drenched guitar and a flange-heavy bass sound, frontman Joakim Br�ms growling monstrously over the confusional song arrangements and twisted time signature changes keeping the whole album on an odd tilt. Weird bluesy breakdowns and searing guitar shred gets mixed in with classical music samples, weird, discordant Voivodian chords. Much like Coroner, Voivod, and later Edge Of Sanity, Afflicted had lofty prog-rock ambitions, but they could also grind as savagely as anyone, spiking their contorted prog-death with violent blastbeats and churning concrete-mixer riffs that balance out their more off-kilter, spaced-out passages. Prodigal Sun delivers an energetic rush of pummeling proggy heaviness, but the most striking moments are their more restrained, like the eerie wah-drenched psychedelia that shows up in the middle of "Rising To The Sun", or the drug-addled detours of "Spirit Spectrum" and the rousing, rocking grooves that cut through closer "Ivory Tower". It's an uneven album, with some songs being stronger than others, but it still delivers plenty of wonderfully violent prog-death that fans of offbeat death metal will want to check out. After this, the band shifted towards more traditional, power metal style, leaving this the one bold oddity in their discography, and by far my favorite stuff of theirs.


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