Band:	Rezn
Album:	Chaotic Divine
Style:	Stoner metal
Release date:	October 2020

01. Emerging
02. Waves Of Sand
03. Garden Green
04. The Door Opens
05. Clear I
06. Optic Echo
07. Mother / Forever Time
08. Inner Architecture
09. Scarab
10. Clear II
11. The Still Center

Either because the genre has just been pretty weak in 2020 or because I simply haven't been paying attention, I haven't heard many doom or stoner metal releases this year that have really knocked my socks off. But that, of course, was before Rezn entered the picture with Chaotic Divine.

Rezn are a relatively young Chicago stoner doom outfit, having formed only recently, in 2016. Chaotic Divine is my first encounter with the band, but it's left quite a good impression that tells me I definitely ought to keep them on my radar going forward. Realistically speaking, Rezn aren't doing anything too new or out of the box on this release, and there are probably a lot of other bands out there in the doom, stoner, and psychedelic spectrums that one could compare their music to. For the bulk of Chaotic Divine, a slow, lumbering stoner doom sound dominates, boosted up by fuzzy bass, excellent drumming, and some great vocals that sound as if they're coming from a woman but could perhaps be male(?) as, looking at the band's press photos and names of their members, it appears no women are present in the lineup. Nonetheless, these wailing, higher end vocals conjure quite a lot of thoughts of Lori S. from Acid King, which is definitely not a bad similarity.

What makes Rezn's music so powerful and impactful isn't so much that they're doing something new well, but rather that they're doing something old better. While the band may not be overly high on the originality factor (although there are two tracks here, "Garden Green" and "The Still Center", which feature saxophone, so there's that), they nonetheless seem to have that "special something" that a lot of present day stoner metal bands seem to lack. In a word, that "something" is diversity. Many stoner metal bands nowadays seem to either focus on a crunchy, riff heavy approach, or a more melodic, atmospheric approach that embraces psychedelia in a heavier fashion. Rezn, however, aren't content with sitting exclusively in either of these two areas, and instead combine them in a pretty impressive 50/50 fashion. You may get some tracks like "Emerging" that lean more toward the riff heavy stoner approach, some like "Garden Green" and "Mother / Forever Time" that lean more toward the trippy acid rock approach, and still others such as "Waves Of Sand" and "Inner Architecture" that manage to merge these two approaches together, to quite the satisfying effect.

Rezn may not be the kind of Avant-garde dark ambient doom metal I would have liked (and am still waiting) to hear this year, but in many ways they don't need to be. What the band may lack in terms of bringing new ideas to the table, they more than make up for with their interpretation of older ideas in a fashion that, quite simply, blows a lot of their present day competition out of the water. Somehow, some way, the jamz Rezn conjure up here on Chaotic Divine just come off as being a lot more immersive, well constructed, and overall emotionally satisfying than what a lot of other doom and stoner bands have to offer today. Though this is their third offering, they have definitely won a fan in me with it, and I'm highly inclined to check out their past material from here while eagerly awaiting whatever comes out of them next.

Chaotic Divine releases tomorrow. You can listen to the two tracks already up for streaming on the Bandcamp player below, or, if you've become intrigued by my writing to the point that you simply need to hear this thing in full right the fuck now, Invisible Oranges has done an exclusive, early premiere of it over here.

Turn on, tune in, drop out.