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Believer > Transhuman > Reviews
Believer - Transhuman

Awkward Prog Thrash - 86%

lostalbumguru, October 7th, 2023
Written based on this version: 2011, CD, Metal Blade Records

Transhuman is first and foremost a concept album dealing with a specific topic a decade or so before that topic and related issues slapped society upside the head in a very upsetting brutal way. If you enjoy prog metal but enjoy it best with no flowers, no catchy moments, no positivity, and an overall very cold, machinelike soundscape, then Transhuman will give you that and haunt the back of your brain for a long time after.

I really like this album because it just at first gives you absolutely nothing, no hooks, no strong pull to a specific mode or key. The scales and note patterns wander inbetween major and minor, and all the timings are in extended patterns and resolution in any melodic or rhythmic sense is hard to come by.

Musically and lyrically Transhuman lives up to its name and gives you a listening experience full of detachment, coldness, mystery, and subtle hints of early 80s synth pop. It's really an album for music nerds. It will leave you with a sense of mild violation and hauntedness, a feeling of being put in the company of something unheimlich. The drums are warm, groovy, but with fill patterns where nothing directly goes anywhere and verse, chorus, and inbetween ideas come and go with no strong tangibility. The guitars and bass are deliberately warm, and cold, and played at a tempo which is neither fast nor slow, but sort of midpaced, without ever really pulling in any direction.

Bachman's vocals are inbetween harsh and clean, and all the lyrics are well constructed and oddly penetrating, even if they are at the same time quite sci-fi and psychedelic. I originally found this album by accident, misfiled in HMV, and actually in retrospect that was the perfect way to rediscover Believer. They've been around, and covered a lot of themes, but Transhuman is their oddest album, and is subtly disturbing. Lie Awake and Ego Machine are slightly catchy if you work around the nonspecific timbre, and wandering drums.

A stand-out aspect of the production in Transhuman is the tastefully embedded keyboard ornamentation.

Gabriel or Gabrielle… Angel or Angeline? - 48%

bayern, May 25th, 2020

Hm, I’m not sure what Kurt Bachman has tried to do here… I could tolerate this “Gabriel” that he cooked as a reunion stint two years earlier, and not only because it was holding on the frayed ends of the good old thrash for a large portion of the time. The cover left me a bit puzzled, though, as I couldn’t quite decide whether this was Gabriel, or Gabrielle that is supposedly meditating there wrapped in blue. I know Gabriel is an angel, but is this an angel there? With horns at that… or is it an angeline?

And what’s going on on the cover here? Things haven’t crystallized much from the previous one as this entity I see can only be described as a UFO (read “unspecified feminine oddity”). Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the picture isn’t very clear but by all means looks promising cause in the not very tapped future we will have males, females, and transales… sorry, transhumans, the much-awaited third gender. In other words, the sexually adventurous will finally have their much-coveted encounter of the third kind. Yeah.

The thing is that, based on what has been served music-wise here, I can’t feel overtly enthusiastic about this encounter. And I find it hard to believe that Believer, a band whose earlier repertoire I love to bits, have chosen to play the role of the fallen angel(s) in the new millennium. Well, they reached those mythical heavenly dimensions with their grand third instalment some 20 years back… I guess living in bliss and luxury up there becomes boring at some stage… and here they are, falling from the skies so rapidly that the hole envisaged from their fall may as well be bigger than the one made by the Tunguska Meteorite.

So what the hell… sorry, heaven happened? Well, the thrash has been exorcised, that’s what; I know, a huge cause for grieving this fact having in mind that Believer were steady providers of genuinely threatening, on-the-verge-of-death thrash just a few aeons ago… but let’s start with the only plus this opus has: Bachman actually sings here, and he does a pretty good job out of this singing, think a not very passionate, but steady semi-clean croon which also perfectly, or at least semi-perfectly, fits the newly acquired modern progressive power metal delivery. Fans of similarly-styled acts like Halcyon Way, mid-period Eldritch, Nevermore, probably Strapping Young Lad may find bits and pieces to like here, but this is so painfully familiar and unsurprising that it’s downright disheartening to hear one of the most visionary outfits from the past diminishing themselves to second-tier chuggers. It’s really hard to point at a more noteworthy moment here; everything flows in this bumpy quasi-groovy, not very melodic fashion save for the psychedelic spacey distraction “Transfection” and the sprawling balladic closer “Mindsteps”. Rowdier, more intense thrash-peppered riffage can one detect on “Ego Machine” but don’t expect those to last through the whole composition although this cut could have been left out of the “Gabriel” recording sessions, its battle-like stance not supported by the remaining sterile, artificially-noisy miasma.

I did try to like this music; I gave this album a few listens when it came out including another one the other night… but that’s it; I won’t torture myself with it anymore. And what’s the point provided that other outfits, the mentioned ones included, have done a much better job traversing this path? And why have Believer chosen it? If there was an audition for the replacement of the sadly departed Nevermore that I didn’t hear about, then I can understand… but there was no way Believer would have qualified for the second round; not with this meek banal approach. Tell me about a lack of imagination and the strife for complacency and merging with the herd… cause here it is, staring you at the face, pricking your ears, making you reconsider your loyalty to this camp. Cause if this is what the future holds for the band then I want no part of it… third, fourth and I don’t how many other encounters, scrap them in the laboratory! Project terminated, or at least postponed, the more indefinitely the better… until the emergence of another batch of true believers in the band’s cause.

I’m not quite sure where these new believers will come from, though; judging by the atmospheric gothic/dark metal the guys have started playing on the ensuing singles, these should be the Fields of the Nefilim and the Sisters of Mercy crowd, above all. There’ll be surely someone swarming around… hats off to Bachman for achieving heaps in the medical science department (a PhD in molecular medicine and cancer research laboratory), but on the music front one miracle may not be enough to bring things back to the times of splendour.

Transhuman, The Total Transformation - 65%

kmorg, July 11th, 2011

Luckily the Believer reunion was not just a 1 album fluke. So here they go again, with their 5th studio album, entitled 'Transhuman'. The line-up remains the same, save for bassist/programmer Elton Nestler who left the band in early 2011.

A more accurate name for 'Transhuman' could have been 'Transformation'. You could hear hints of it on 'Gabriel', but here the changes are total. Save for the intricate songwriting, the technical playing and to an extent Kurt's voice, it's a very different Believer we hear on 'Transhuman'. They are certainly no longer a thrash metal band, but reside much more in modern metal territory. I personally think they sound like a mixture of newer In Flames and the latter albums from Extol, if you remove those bands extreme metal leanings. The industrial leanings on 'Gabriel' are still here, but the loops and samples are used more intact with the songs, and not so much as a backdrop or soundscape behind and/or over the music. The songs are atmospheric and without apparent hooks. Only repeated listening lets you crawl under the albums web-like skin. There is no knowing what comes next on this album.

Another change with Believer are the lyrics. They are currently not what anyone would call a Christian band, and the lyrics on 'Transhuman' deals more with philosophy, science and universal existential questions.

'Transhuman' will come as a shock to many devoted fan of this band. It has little in common with the Believer of old, yet to me it represents a somewhat natural step forth from 'Gabriel'. I mentioned In Flames and Extol earlier in this write-up, both bands who have received tons of flack for changing the sound they initially became famous for. Yet I have always stuck by, and defended, both bands in all of their shapes and musical forms. I will do the same for Believer and 'Transhuman'. And I'll do it because the album is good! Sure, it is different, but as long as they keep it as solid and interesting as they have done with this album, them I am onboard for the ride. Music should have you coming back for more, and 'Transhuman' would not eave my player when it was first put in it.

Killer tracks: Lie Awake, G.U.T., Clean Room, Traveler, Entanglement

Difficult to believe in - 52%

autothrall, April 12th, 2011

The chronological gulf between Believer's 1993 album Dimensions and their 2009 comeback (through Metal Blade) Gabriel was a substantial one, but I was still rather happy with the result. I've long considered this to be one of the better Christian metal acts in general, certainly one of the standouts of such secular thrash, because they portrayed their message with devotion and intelligence rather than hammering you in the face with obvious ignorance that seems so belligerent to a largely atheist or questioning crowd. Gabriel was, however, not so well received in the larger scheme. The band had continued to progress their sound, as they had from the great 1990 sophomore Sanity Obscure to the following Dimensions, but some felt there were not enough traces of the same excellence.

Well, Transhuman is true to that which its title implies, in that its taken Believer's sound about as far out of the mortal encasement of flesh that the bold and punishing core of Sanity Obscure once delivered. Though there are clearly some thrash undertones remaining here, this is more like a robotic facsimile of modern power and progressive metal. There are some chugging groove elements here that, when mixed with the almost Linkin Park-like melodic strain of the vocals definitely come up short (i.e. "Lie Awake"). Not that such a strain is necessarily unfit to the simpler thrash beneath, but it often feels like longtime frontman Kurt Bachman is attempting to deliver too much emotion throughout. Probably a better comparison would be the modern records of Germans Angel Dust, which use a similar mix of modern chugging and mid-range, soaring vocals, though Believer certainly get pretty angry on a number of these songs like "End of Infinity", "G.U.T." and "Clean Room", better reflective of the past records.

Sadly, despite the decent, modern atmosphere the band is kneading here to sufficiently flesh out their concept, the album is ultimately just not up to par with their backlog. The driving, primitive chug patterns are glazed in effete melodic guitars that never add up to anything memorable, and even the more 'experimental' ambient metal like the instrumental segue "Currents" feels a little cheesy. Some of the 'big hitters' like "Ego Machine" have a pretty awkward structure with the mix of shouted and clean vocals, and the overall work feels like something that might have been written and subsequently left behind in the mid-90s as a Fear Factory alternative by some similar act like Tourniquet or Anacrusis. As someone who truly enjoyed Sanity Obscure and the stranger Dimensions, and had remained on board even for Gabriel, I found this effort to be the antithesis of compelling, easily the least of their works to date.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com