Don't be fooled by the flaming skulls and innumerable body piercings: Prog-metal bands are the geekiest collectives in contemporary music. They're geekier than video game cover bands. Even geekier than geek rock. When they're not sitting in their bedrooms memorizing scales and modes, they're performing finger exercises to increase things like pinky strength and pick speed. Behind every ass-kicking riff lies about a dozen years of neo-classical guitar lessons and privately-tutored ear training. On Behold...the Arctopus's second EP, Nano-Nucleonic Cyborg Summoning, the New York trio showcases years of extensive schooling on three incredibly dense prog-metal opuses, hardly coming up for air over the course of a furious 17-minute span.
At the epicenter of this metal maelstrom is the touch guitar, or as Arctopus touch ax-man Colin Marston calls it, the "12-string Hell-harp." The monstrosity spans the range of both bass and guitar and its fret-tap friendly design would make any guitar shop employee shit his pants. But enough advertising, how valuable is this thing musically? Sure, Marston can bend, tap, trill, slap, and pluck to his heart's content, but as Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteem have demonstrated time and time again, technical prowess isn't necessarily equated with aesthetic success.
For several instances on opener "Exospacial Psionic Aura", Marston and company appear to buck this trend. The jazz breakdowns, blistering arpeggios, and almost-catchy outro make it worth waiting through entire minutes of mindless Mixolydian mode improvising. Unfortunately, the band blows their load early here, leaving little creativity for the remaining two tracks. Frenetic pick scrapes and blitzkrieg cymbal crashes at 180 BPM can get awfully tedious after 17 minutes, and excepting the occasional acid-rock interlude, this is all the Arctopus pumps out.
Metal-shredding guitars and machine-gun drumming should never become boring, but sadly the band's affinity for mathematical riffing and technical showmanship suck out all the fun. For a band whose moniker is a command, the Arctopus come off as pretty lackluster. And as for the "12-string Hell-harp," I haven't seen ax gear this ridiculous since Spinal Tap's amps went to 11.
