Band:	Alley
Album:	Amphibious
Style:	Extreme progressive metal
Release date:	March 25, 2013
A review by:	BitterCOld

01. Lighthouse
02. Weather Report
03. Amphibious
04. Skulls & Bones
05. Time Signal
06. Washed Away

Alley are a progressive death metal band from Krasnoyarsk, Russia.

You can't spell "progressive death" without using the letters "O-P-E-T & H" (well unless you spell worse than K7? ) and that's probably the best place to start in describing Alley's sound.

Amphibious features six songs ranging from just under eight minutes to north of a quarter-hour in length. These songs wind their way along, alternating between moderate paced thundering distortion and roared vocals and jazzy interludes and passages with clean vocals.

Sound familiar?

Now, sure, I've used Mikael and Co as a "sounds like" example in the past simply because, well, they're amongst the biggest metal bands on the planet and their dynamic is widely understood. It's an easy comparison for acts writing nine minute long tracks that go harsh to clean and back again.

In this case it's a pretty direct comparison as the similarities go far beyond just playing a vaguely similar style of music - in regards to composition even my tin ear was able to immediately draw similarities down to even vocal patterns.

If that sounds like a slam, it's not, not in particular. Seems a lot of bands wear their influences on their sleeves. Besides, the band pretty much states as much on the album's bandcamp page.

Alley do it and do it well. I found myself enjoying this almost as much as My Arms, Your Still Park. Well in the same ballpark as almost.

So if you're a fan of Opeth who was pissed off by Heritage, this will probably slip nicely in the slot in your CD rack voided when threw your copy of Mikael's latest out the window. Or, more likely, the sequence of 1's and 0's voided somewhere in your hard drive when you hit "ragedelete!"