Animals as Leaders feature

I was skimming through the August issue of Guitar World magazine and I noticed a feature on the band Animals as Leaders. Animals as Leaders is an instrumental progressive metal band featuring members of defunct Washington, D.C. progressive metalcore group “Reflux.” The brainchild of Animals as Leaders is guitar player Tosin Abasi. In a feature in the same issue of Guitar World, he explained that he wanted to make music that was “more universal” as opposed to “I play guitar and this has a lot of guitar.”

It’s kind of odd that I find this article because I’ve been looking for what some would call instrumental progressive metal or instrumental metal in general. Yeah, that’s kind of specific, huh? But seriously, I’ve been on this progressive rock/jazz fusion quest that has lead me from Mahavishnu Orchestra to progressive death metal bands such as Cynic…

yes that includes instrumental project Planet X. Interesting enough, Tosin Abasi is using an 8 string guitar on this project.

I found a few compositions on the Animals as Leaders Myspace page and all three of them quite caught my interest.

“Tempting Time”

This is a nice fusion of glitch, heavy and complicated guitars and odd time signatures. Actually, this reminds me of an outtake off of Frank Zappa’s Grammy award winning instrumental album “Jazz from Hell.”
“On Impulse”
Nice arpeggio, that puts you in a diaphanous mindset. The jazzier and glitch-y elements sound like a link between Nu-Metal and Jazz Fusion.

“CAFO”

This can be described as an example of what I would consider a nice mix of jazz and metal. This has some great and tasteful use of 8-string shredding. This composition can be very delicate at times but very aggressive at the same time. It’s kind of like a pit bull with a skirt.

For my readers with more experimental taste, this is a great album and like Abasi stated earlier, this is a very guitar –driven but all around musically universal album.

http://www.myspace.com/animalsasleaders