Holy smokes, these hometown heroes can play instrumental prog like nobody's damn business. This album is fucking amazing.It's hard enough to start a band these days in a town that's not known for having a thriving music scene, but that's exactly what Scale The Summit did in my home town of Houston, Texas back in the mid 2000s, putting out their debut album in 2007 on their own. Since then, they've released three sucessive albums through Prosthetic Records bringing us to their latest work, The Migration. And it's a progressive instrumental lover's sweet, melodic dream.
Far from the wankery of their brilliant-but-way-too-esoteric musical predecessors like Watchtower (another Texas band), Scale The Summit's strength is its firm foundation in melody; more Gordian Knot than Messhugah. And no matter how intricate Chris [Letchford] and Travis [Levrier]'s complimentary guitar passages get, there's always a strong sense of direction from beginning to end like a boat floating down a river. Indeed even when things go from pensive to energetic as on Evergreen, you never get the feeling of disorientation that some bands do; you need a melodic anchor in an instrumental piece when the vocals aren't there to tie it all together emotionally. Think Animals As Leaders meets...Eric Johnson? However you want to describe what they're doing, I just hope they keep doing [in Houston] it for a long time to come.
The Bottom Line: These hometown boys have done it again! They've put out an amazing catalog of music in the short time they've been around and they show no signs of stopping with each new album sounding better than the last. If you get a chance to see them live, DO IT!
Tracks To Make Your Guitar Playing Irrelevant: The whole damn album
- Genghis sometimes just looks at his guitars and asks "who am I kidding?"...