Band:	Caligula's Horse
Album:	Charcoal Grace
Style:	Alternative metal, Progressive metal
Release date:	January 2024

01. The World Breathes With Me
02. Golem
03. Charcoal Grace I: Prey
04. Charcoal Grace II: A World Without
05. Charcoal Grace III: Vigil
06. Charcoal Grace IV: Give Me Hell
07. Sails
08. The Stormchaser
09. Mute

Bookended by songs both at or above the 10-minute mark and with a four-part title track as its centrepiece, Charcoal Grace is prog band Caligula's Horse at their proggiest.

Across the past decade, Caligula's Horse have grown to be true darlings of the prog-metal fanbase; as mentioned in my review of Rise Radiant, they’re a band that haven’t quite swept me away in the way they have legions of others, but I do get a good level of enjoyment out of their material, and particularly their last two releases. Rise Radiant was released during the pandemic, and like innumerous other bands, Caligula's Horse were personally and professionally affected by the pandemic; album number 6, titled Charcoal Grace, draws inspiration from the group’s strife and hopelessness during this time, along with their hopes for a better future.

The title of Charcoal Grace, according to the band, is intended to reflect ‘the grim allure and strange beauty in stillness, silence, and loss’. The album does explore beautiful, softer sounds quite a bit across its runtime, but in truth, Charcoal Grace is more a dynamic album rather than a ‘soft’ one. The band’s full range is on display here, including on the 10-minute opener “The World Breathes With Me”; there’s delicate sounds in the cleaner parts, but also subtly darker tones, while the heavier riffs can both pack a crunch and carry a sense of brightness. Jim Grey’s typically smooth vocals guide listeners through a convoluted journey that spans warm choruses, huge-sounding chugs, glowing melodic peaks (backed up at times by moving strings), and evocative guitar soloing.

“The World Breathes With Me” is the kind of track that can let newcomers know in one song whether the band will appeal, both due to its range and due to it being one of the band’s best efforts to date; “Golem” is more specific in its focus, but follows a legacy of tracks such as “Rust” and “Slow Violence” in being shorter, hookier and heavier. Those two older songs exhibit aspects of what’s stopped me fully clicking with the group previously, and some of the vocal delivery in the verses on “Golem” doesn’t quite do it for me, but overall, with its winding riffs, the punch it packs into its heaviest moments, and the ambivalent tone of the chorus that feels both hopeful and ominous, I consider it among their strongest attempts at a song such as this, particularly with its rousing climax.

In contrast to “Golem”, the next portion of the tracklist is occupied by material that represents something new for Caligula's Horse: a four-song suite. Spanning 24 minutes, “Charcoal Grace” in all its parts is potentially the most ambitious thing that the band have done to date, and they pull it off successfully. The first ‘movement’, “Prey”, has a bit of a classic prog touch to the opening guitar solo and instrumentation, but the bulk of the song is more modern, as an understated electronic-featuring section nicely escalates tension with a progressive dialling up of the heaviness. Part two, “A World Without”, may feature some of the prettiest instrumentation and melodies on the record, from the guitar leads to Grey’s honey-sweet singing; concluding movement “Give Me Hell” brings the heaviness more, delivering brooding intensity that is accentuated by further use of strings, but the song nevertheless retains a grandeur to its soundscapes.

There’s a real climactic triumphant feel to the ending of “Give Me Hell” and the whole “Charcoal Grace” suite; in working out how to sustain momentum from this point to the end of the record, the band first dive into acoustic tenderness on “Sails” (with a lush guitar solo), before delivering rich heaviness at a stately pace on the deliberate and textured “The Stormchaser”. The relative lull and gradual escalation of this pair of songs is necessary in setting the platform for 12-minute closer “Mute”, a track that traverses tranquil balladry and gnarly technical riffery, before incorporating woodwind into a delectable closing few minutes that ensures the record finishes on the highest of high notes.

I must admit, there’s still a certain je ne sais quoi to Charcoal Grace that stops me fully embracing it, but this is the sound of Caligula's Horse at their best; if any album of theirs ends up turning me into a full-blown fan, it’ll likely be this one. I don’t love it the whole way through (on top of my qualms with “Golem”, the mostly acoustic “Charcoal Grace III: Vigil” is somewhat soporific), but for the most part, it is a very solid record that has a number of high moments on the likes of “A World Without”, “Give Me Hell” and “Mute”. In the band’s discography, it slots in comfortably alongside In Contact at the top of the rankings, just lacking a song as front-to-back brilliant as “Graves” to take the number one slot outright.