Who said that djent was a formatted music? Certainly not The Dali Thundering Concept who, already in 2018 with "Savages" offered us an original, ambitious and uncompromising album. With "All Mighty Men", the Frenchmen push the concept even further and rely on a totally assumed eclecticism to temper a little the violence that remains the foundation of their music, making this new effort the most inventive album we've heard in ages in the progressive djent/djentcore category.
Of course, the foundations of The Dali Thundering Concept's music are still there. The contributions of industrial metal ('God Is Dead') and metalcore ('Enter The Limbo') remain well anchored in the DNA of the band, the pachydermic riffs and the polyrhythms inherited from Meshuggah are legion ('As The sirens Call', 'Long Live Man') and illustrate marvelously its dark and worrying universe. Besides, the incredible 'The Sea Starts Here' will remain as such the most crazy track that the Frenchmen have ever composed, conferring to their tormented djent a hallucinated grindcore madness.
But the great strength of "All Mighty Men" lies precisely in its concept. If "Savages" was already very committed to ecology, this new album is just as much, but The Dali Thundering Concept takes a salutary step back to get their message across. By choosing to tell us the adventures of Barry The Straw, a plastic straw that has become the symbol of our consumer society, the band adds a cartoonish dimension to its commitment to the planet. So much so that the album, conceived like the soundtrack of a feature film, remains constantly interesting, especially since the sequences between each track are a real lesson in songwriting.
It is thus with an inventiveness never taken in default that The Dali Thundering Concept illustrates the journey of Barry. First by integrating to his concept album some beautiful instrumental passages, like the very melancholic 'Styx' and its piano/cello duet or the very jazzy 'Serenading Silence' on which Morgan Berthet (Kadinja, Klone, Myrath) and Jake Howsam Lowe (the guitarist who accompanies Plini on stage) are illustrated. On the other hand by alternating saturated vocals with clear vocals (and even sometimes rap) which were clearly lacking on the previous album and which clearly reinforce the evocative power of certain titles ('Lost In Transaction', 'Candid Monster').
"All Mighty Men" is a real success, as well in its conception as in its bias to conceive the djent outside the usual standards in which too many bands have confined it. Whereas Uneven Structure seems to give no more sign of life, The Dali Thundering Concept imposes itself, with this brilliant concept-album, as the most inventive French djent group by far.