Band:	Alkaloid
Album:	The Malkuth Grimoire
Style:	Extreme progressive metal
Release date:	March 2015

01. Carbon Phrases
02. From A Hadron Machinist
03. Cthulhu
04. Alter Magnitudes
05. Orgonism
06. Dyson Sphere - I. Mining The Oorth Cloud
07. Dyson Sphere - II. Assembly
08. Dyson Sphere - III. Kardashev II.1 The God Oven
09. Dyson Sphere - IV. Sol Omega
10. The Malkuth Grimoire
11. C-Value Enigma
12. Funeral For A Continent

When it comes to progressive metal, one finds many die-hard fans and others who can't handle it at all. It might be that this genre has a larger ratio of musicians among the fans, those who comprehend the music are more likely to enjoy it with all its facets. Out of nothing now a new band emerged; Alkaloid from Germany greet us with their first ever release after their formation just a year ago. The musicians, however, are known to some people from their work with other big bands like Necrophagist, Obscura or Dark Fortress. Therefore, calling this new project a big surprise would be a bit of an exaggeration, nevertheless the music is worth the praise it currently receives.

The new work entitled The Malkuth Grimoire consists of twelve songs and fills the standard capacity of a CD with its 73 minutes of playing time. All the tracks are quite different from each other, save the "Dyson Sphere" cycle with four consecutive songs that belong together. The music is extreme progressive style, which naturally shows some similarities to the technical death metal genre, yet the music stays just enough down-to-earth at all times so that even easy-listeners won't be lost, like it happens with other bands during endless solos and let's-play-a-hundred-notes-per-bar songs. The progressiveness in this album is rather prominent through the variety of styles, including clean and harsh vocals, acoustic and distorted guitars, groovy and crushing drums and so on. The same goes for the lyrics, which cover many topics from dark stuff over fiction to science.

Musicianship is a most important point for Alkaloid, as expected when looking through the member list. A most interesting feature for those who know how to play it is the hybrid bass that consists of four fretted and two fretless strings, allowing both supporting bass tones and singing treble notes as witnessed in many tracks. Songwriting seems to be the second most important point, for although the music is enjoyable for everyone, the album isn't packed with most awesome moments throughout the whole playing time. Instead, one might like half of the songs but not the other half for example, depending on which style fits his taste best. Personally I am in favour of the first two and the last track plus the "Dyson Sphere" songs which are funny and musically interesting at the same time. Whether a song like "C-Value Enigma" was needed is arguably worth another discussion.

Altogether, The Malkuth Grimoire is a worthy debut album that has something to offer for everyone, not only musicians. Having already raised the bar by themselves it is hard to find a truly outstanding track as all of them maintain a constantly high level, but with a gun on my chest I'd probably go with the opener "Carbon Phrases". Some songs maybe need listening-work to be fully understood, but in general Alkaloid greatly managed to build a bridge between the technical and publicly enjoyable camps in metal.