Album Review: Virgil - The Pacer EP 8 (Prog)

Virgil
The Pacer
Prog metal/Prog/Jazz/nerdcore
USA
2018
8/10

I got put onto this one after chatting with Dr.Knudson who did the cover art for Welcome to Bonkers. He also did the art for this tight little EP from an american prog instrumental outfit called Virgil. So check him out, this artwork speaks a lot to the complicated and chaotic nature of the music. It’s pretty badass.

I adore the guitar tones used, especially the higher almost 8 bit sounding stuff. It reminds me a lot of the OST for Risk Of Rain (YouTube), which I highly recommend. It’s a similar level of bouncy energy and composition. There’s a couple of things going on here that I appreciate, on one end there’s a lot of Dream Theater and Cynic type tones and solos and strangely, in another way has this sense of late era Elliott Smith with the keys and a kind of altpop recording and mixing. It makes The Pacer a unique blend of ideas that thrive with high production quality and talent.

The bass on this is really cool too, has the vibe of old school death metal where the cleaner tones pop around at a fast pace, playing it’s own piece along side the guitar the guitar. It’s a very busy 20 minutes witch each one giving you something to new to notice. The only real downfall of this is just the accessibility of the genre, more people need to get into purely instrumental music. If you don’t really listen to them then just give this one a go, it should be convincing. I like a lot of these kind of albums for when I’m studying or doing something intensive like modding Morrowind/Skyrim then never playing it.

Really well put together stuff with a strong audio appeal, lending it’s self to high replay value. That’s the good thing about an EP is it’s always just short enough to enjoy once or move on, or play a few times. There’s no over-committing and it lets you get a nice dose of something else into your music rotation. Personally I review a lot of EP’s for this reason, sometimes you just want a really solid 25 minutes of very specific music. And here it is, so check it out and follow Chris Knific on instagram @cknific