THE VISIT - Through Darkness Into Light (2015)

Review by: Ali Ghoneim
Album assigned by: Kevin O'Meara

This album is to metal what Sparks’ Lil Beethoven is to electronic music.

Or at least that’s the conclusion I — someone who hasn’t listened to much metal beyond Sabbath — have made after listening to a 55 minute long “metal” album with no guitars. The metal tag comes from the band’s bandcamp page, so know that I’m not making any assumptions here.

Purely in terms of form and structure, I can see how someone could argue that this is a metal album. Chugging guitars are replaced with cellos, but you can still recognise the music that they’re playing as distinctly metal — again I don’t know much about metal so take that with a grain of salt. 

Prior to listening to this album, I had been aware that some metal acts liked to mix a lot of baroque/orchestral passages into their songs, but I was under the impression that those passages would then eventually gave way to stereotypical metal fair. Here, however, the whole album seems to be one prolonged ornate passage, which really caught me off guard the first time I listened to it. Here I was thinking: “Ok, the guitars are definitely gonna come in now….ok now……now?” But they never did, and the album was a much more interesting and engaging “metal” album because of it.

To be completely fair, it might very well be that these kind of metal albums sans guitar and drums are common, and that the visit isn’t doing anything new. In that case, my opening statement is a lot of hyperbole from someone who doesn’t know shit about metal. But AS someone who doesn’t know shit about metal, Through Darkness Into Light was a pretty enlightening listen.