Band:	Atrox
Album:	Orgasm
Style:	Progressive gothic metal
Release date:	2003

01. Methods Of Survival
02. Flesh City
03. Heartquake
04. Burning Bridges
05. This Vigil
06. Tentacles
07. Second Hand Traumas
08. Pre-Sense

Well, well? what an album we have here! Faithful to its tradition of innovation and avanguardism, Code666 publish the 4thalbum of this Norwegian band that begun in 1988 by playing a death-doom kind of metal, and that, through a long journey of evolution (1 EP, 4 full length albums and a line-up completely changed) presents now itself with the problematic label of Progressive Skizo Metal.
What is that? Well, the recipe for the Atrox sound could be that: 250gr of Meshuggah, 200gr of The Gathering, 25gr of atmospheric electronic synths; mix with a teaspoon of jazz arrangements and rythmics. At the end, add fantasy and madness as much as you want.

Apart from those shitty tentatives of mine to be funny, I believe that the music proposed by Atrox is one of the most original and innovative crossover between different metal styles that I've ever heard. If possible a new (sub)genre in itself.

Since you find female vocals you could say that it's gothic metal, but I have to say that this is not.
You can hear a track beginning with a heavy stopped rhythmic guitar riff in typical thrash/Meshuggah style, perfectly realized with a syncopated timing, and you could expect to hear a growling vocal, but... no, the riff stops and a jazz bass arrangement introduces us the voice of the talented singer Monika, that performs weird, variegated vocal lines, over the slow passages as well over the heaviest parts.
Forget of her Norwegian colleague like Liv Kristine of Vibeke Stene and their operatic heavenly voices, Monika's voice is definitely more jazz oriented, but not less beautiful. Her tone is more like Anneke Van Giersbergen just to make an example, but surely uses her voice in a more varied, played way, a mad journey up and down through the octaves.
Just a few times, in some songs, you can hear a male vocalist that duets with Monika, but it's perhaps useless since her voice doesn't really need of any support.

We almost have no solo guitar at all, I find that in this album the bass guitar is important and audible as much as the rhythmic guitar: now used for a jazz flavored riff now synchronized with the guitar for a heavy thrash riff, it always works very well, giving a "full" sound to the whole album.

This alternation of "thrashy", heavily deconstructed parts with slow "jazzy" ones, in which the song is totally based on the voice of Monika or on an elaborated bass riffing, makes this album not immediately "easylistening" (try to hear the second part of the last track), but if you listen it more and more you'll begin to fuckin' like that style! The timing of the rhythmic section is something simply great, a time is never repeated too long and it's always of a damned complexity, sometimes almost difficult to follow.

A sound that's not too soft, to appeal those who likes an heavy riffing, but enough to have atmospheric and ethereal moments that put in an unexpected change. Something of really new, definitely virtuously played and with a vein of madness that makes the result really intriguing, 50 minutes of album, but you'll hardly feel bored to listen it all.

A positive notation deserves the artwork, (in a 6-panel digipack for the final version) with a very good painting realized by... Moinka Edvardsen, the singer (!) Well done Atrox. That's one of the most original and interesting "female vocal" metal album I've ever heard. Go on with the evolution.