Band:	The Bipolar Disorder Project
Album:	Black
Style:	Avantgarde metal, Progressive metal
Release date:	April 26, 2023
A review by:	ScreamingSteelUS

01. Outside
02. Gunner Runner
03. Sumitomo Girl
04. Birth
05. Awake Me
06. Wears The Shoe [feat. Oceanai]
07. Bliss

I was introduced to The Bipolar Disorder Project in the worst of ways: through the news of mainman Robert Cotoros’s untimely death in 2020. The recordings he made in the years leading up to his passing have made their way to us in the form of Black, a second studio album that follows the serene and artful Anna.

Revisiting Anna in preparation for Black, what struck me first was the fluidity of the album. While there is much variation in the genre and mood (and volume) of each song, the delicate surface tension never breaks; the wistfulness in Cotoros’s voice and the calmness of the instrumentation, even at its heaviest, maintain a kind of classic prog rock suspension in emotion. What Black hits me with at the outset is a similar kind of astral quietude. It’s not detached or disaffected per se, but clearly absorbed in a world of its own making, focused inward on the loosely flowing synth melodies and dreamy vocal lines. That same feeling of consistency envelops Black, placing the myriad positive and negative emotions it explores along a melodious continuum.

It is unclear from the announcement of Black how much of the album was completed before Cotoros’s death, so my ability to make inferences about the synthesis of the album is limited, but Cotoros is listed as the only musician performing on the entire album (with the exception of Oceanai’s T.R. Larsen on “Wears The Shoe”), and therefore I think it’s safe to perceive this sonic uniformity as being intentional as much as it was on Anna. What distinguishes Black from Anna is how much less metal it is; Anna was comfortable discarding and restoring its occasionally djenty prog metal elements whenever it served the mood, with the result that much of the album dwells more in progressive rock, but Black resorts to overt heaviness less frequently. Black instead amplifies the ambient and synthpop sides of The Bipolar Disorder Project: Cotoros’s hazy vocals layer in dreamy hooks while electronic percussion and synths build reflective, immersive grooves, mixing with the latent prog influences for a kind of Phil Collins sound. “Awake Me,” which best exhibits this shift, is also possibly my favorite track on the album and suggests that The Bipolar Disorder Project might have prospered from further developing these elements. The metal aspects are not neglected, however; if they are reduced to hiding behind corners, it’s not to any detriment of the album. “Sumitomo Girl” beings in somber ambiance and not until halfway through does it erupt into another prog metal volcano, and the contrast makes the song more powerful than it would have been left to either mode alone.

Perhaps the one downfall of Black is its brevity: the album runs a scant ~27 minutes, with two of its seven tracks being short transitory pieces, and for an album with such rich, sensitive atmosphere and this degree of stylistic variety, a lengthier period to soak in the music would work much more to its benefit. The present short duration leaves the album feeling incomplete – avenues unexplored, moods not fully developed. I suppose we can’t resent this circumstance too strongly, due to the unfortunate constraints of this being a posthumous release; though Black may not be as polished or as fulfilling as Anna, it contains the same ideas that made that album great and is able to stand on its own absent the designation of epitaphic release. The people who made this release possible – colleagues, friends, and family of Robert Cotoros – put together an album that reflects the talents of the man whose dream it was.