Band:	Ubiquity
Album:	The Ascendant Travels Among The Stars
Style:	Extreme progressive metal
Release date:	September 15, 2024
A review by:	musclassia

01. Tensegrity
02. Tree Of Pain
03. The Traveler
04. Coma
05. Red Moon
06. Endless Depths
07. In A Blink

For all these years since Heritage was released, there has been a fanbase hungry for Opeth to just ‘sound like Opeth’; now, right as they’re on the cusp of dialling back the years with The Last Will And Testament, they’ve got some fierce competition to contend with.

Much like the fates of Abigail Williams and Vale Of Pnath, Ubiquity and Omnerod are bands that began life separately, but who have now become inextricably intertwined. Formed by guitar duo Anthony Deneyer and Jérôme Blondiaux back in 2015, Ubiquity recruited a first iteration of a rhythm section prior to recording 2017 EP Towards Oblivion. However, in 2019, Deneyer found himself lending his guitar and vocal duties to Omnerod, and in return, Omnerod’s remaining founding members Romain Jeuniaux and Pablo Schwilden Diaz rounded out the line-up of Ubiquity. Despite the extensive overlap between the two groups, Deneyer’s full debut with Omnerod last year, The Amensal Rise, and the first record released by the new-look version of Ubiquity, debut full album The Ascendant Travels Among The Stars, do not merely sound like the output of the same musicians under different names.

That’s particularly remarkable considering that Omnerod and Ubiquity both fall under the same ‘extreme prog’ umbrella. However, while the former’s new album naturally drew comparisons to acts such as Devin Townsend, Between The Buried And Me and The Faceless, there’s only one name that is likely to come first to mind when listening to Ubiquity’s debut, and as already alluded to, that’s Opeth. It’s perhaps not quite as uncanny as the resemblance detected on Piah Mater’s recent release Under The Shadow Of A Foreign Sun, and what similarity that is present is arguably leaning towards a later period in Opeth’s discography, but the comparison is nonetheless hard to overlook.

Now, before I delve into whether relying too heavily on this comparison would be a disservice to what Ubiquity have accomplished with The Ascendant Travels Among The Stars, I want to take a moment to discuss whether it would be a bad thing even if that wasn’t the case. As much as I don’t think Opeth owed their fans anything in terms of artistic direction after releasing an almost universally acclaimed streak of albums between Orchid and Watershed, there were also plenty of people who, perfectly reasonably, would have liked to have heard more music in the style that Opeth pioneered. Furthermore, while I think there’s a few sonic niches that both pioneers and innovators have exhausted all truly exciting ideas within, Opeth’s style is sprawling and evocative enough that there’s scope to craft standalone great new songs that take strong stylistic beats from the trail that Opeth blazed, and both Piah Mater and now Ubiquity have produced albums that don’t hide their source of inspiration, but also highlight the strengths of said inspiration rather than being encumbered by it.

The Ascendant Travels Among The Stars clocks in at a round hour, with the large majority of that runtime taken up by five tracks in and around the magic 10-minute mark. The first of these, “Tree Of Pain”, immediately sets off the ‘00s Opeth’ detector with its understated clean guitar/vocal opening, as Deneyer’s cleans and subsequent growls resemble Åkerfeldt in a way he never did on The Amensal Rise. Beyond that point, the atmospheric guitar leads, rhythmically choppy extreme metal riffs, sick guitar licks, shimmering keyboards, striking guitar solo, and mellotron-guided soft detour that follow are inherently familiar in both their individual execution and in their combination with the other elements. Ubiquity really aim for the Ghost Reveries era of Opeth, but damn do they nail it, as this track feels like such an accomplished and rewarding throwback.

Those sentiments can be mostly expressed towards the remainder of the tracklist, but there are moments in which Ubiquity bring a little extra to the table. For example, there’s a doomy bleakness to the early stages of “Red Moon” that offers a pleasant change of pace, and the same song ratchets up the peak of the intensity later on by tossing some wacky guitar noise into a full-pelt blast-fest before transitioning into a lush clean vocal passage. The album’s closing and longest song, “In A Blink”, does have more than a touch of Deliverance to its double bass rolls and janky riffs, but there’s certain moments of weirdness and extremity that push it over into unexpected territory.

In truth, though, these are but brief moments amongst an avalanche of material that will leave you frequently trying to figure out why you can’t remember what Opeth album the currently playing song is from. In some ways, it does slightly limit the album’s full potential, but truth be told, this is some absolutely top-notch Opeth worship; whether it’s pummelling riffs, soaring solos, achingly tender soft passages with haunting vocals, or whatever else, The Ascendant Travels Among The Stars fully captures all the sounds and emotions that Opeth used to create and evoke, respectively. The solos in “The Traveler” and “In A Blank”, the beastly key-bolstered riffs in “Red Moon”, the bleak majesty as the soft moments of “Endless Depths” explode into contorted extremity enhanced by rich vocal harmonies: as overly familiar at they are, these moments just hit the mark so nicely.

Compared with Under The Shadow Of A Foreign Sun, I’m not sure if The Ascendant Travels Among The Stars perhaps hits quite the same peaks, but the consistency across the album is remarkable. Ubiquity’s debut is an album that requires both that you enjoy the music of a specific established band and that you’re open to hearing that music created by different musicians, but if these are not barriers to you, then The Ascendant Travels Among The Stars is one of the strongest recreations of a classic sound that you’ll hear all year.