About 30. That's roughly the number of subgenres in metal music. Admittedly many of them are a bit far-fetched, but they at least allow us to categorize the bands, even if many of them refuse the labels. But sometimes, some of them throw in our gums a missile that sends all these categories to the wind and allows us to go back to the fundamentals. This is the case with Irist's debut album, "Order Of The Mind". Forget labels, adjectives, prefixes and suffixes, "Order Of The Mind" is a metal album, the real one, the one that wears out the cervicals, hypnotizes the crowds and takes off the membranes of the speakers.
Irist is the story of two South Americans who emigrated to Atlanta, Argentinean guitarist Pablo Davila and Chilean bassist Bruno Segovia, who hire local musicians, guitarist Adam Mitchell and drummer Jason Belisha, and a Brazilian singer, Rodrigo Carvalho, to form the band that is on its way to becoming the metal revelation of the year. Of course, Irist's influences include Gojira, Mastodon and Sepultura. But this first album has so much personality that it would be very unfair to just list them.
"Order Of The Mind" contains all the ingredients to allow the confined metalheads to recreate the Hellfest in their living room: Dantesque riffs that skilfully mix simplicity and technique ('Severed', 'Dead Prayers'), a rhythm section of dreadful power ('Creation', 'Order Of The Mind') and vocals that are as raging as they are desperate. And then there's this haunting and aerial lead guitar that radiates all the tracks, that insinuates itself between our ears to never let us go, that hypnotizes us by bringing just the right amount of lightness to the heaviness of the riffs ('Creation').
But Irist's talent doesn't stop there. The tracks that compose "Order Of The Mind" may be short and dense as lead, but most of them are sprinkled with short atmospheric and melodic breaks that give the Georgians' music a constant intensity and depth and real moments of grace in the middle of a flood of darkness ('Insurrection', 'Harvester').
"Order Of The Mind" is a powerful, intense and inspired debut album. Irist slaps us out of the torpor of an anxiety-provoking confinement with a salutary slap and is the metal revelation of the beginning of the year.