“Through the Mountains of Meloncollia” by Luck Wont Save You totally took me by surprise a few weeks ago.  This album was released on September 13th, 2024 and I heard absolutely nothing about it until almost a week ago(October 18th 2024).  Since I discovered this gem I can’t stop listening to it!  Hello Metalheads this is John back with another review for you. 

This band has somehow managed to create this unhinged and cohesive brand of heavy progressive music.  To me this feels like the very first two to three albums from Between The Buried and Me(Btbam) but with deathcore influences instead of metalcore!  Btbam always had a huge amount of death metal undertones in their music in the early days but always had an overarching progressive metalcore feel to it.  By unhinged I mean they somehow manage to switch riffs, grooves and genres at the drop of a hat.  They do all of this while keeping things feeling natural like it belongs.  Some bands try this and it feels so disconnected, while Luck Wont Save You make it seem less(Disconnected)

The band is comprised of Russell Eck, Morgan Eck and Jared Klein(Rivers of Nihil).  This album also includes a ton of features ranging from guitar solos, a trumpet solo, whole drum tracks and vocals as well.  The composition style of this album is a stream of consciousness.  By this I mean that the form of the music doesn’t follow typical standards.  There aren’t usual chorus or verses in this, it just kind of goes where ever it feels like it wants to.  They really do this very well and it all makes sense once it is listened to a bunch of times.  Just another way I compare this to BTBAM.

The title track(Through the Mountains of Meloncollia) begins with the breakdown at the end of the first track which I will cover last!  The breakdown has a really great groove but finally ends with a very heavy chugging finale.  The track then almost stops but changes into almost an intro with female singing that is very melodic and uplifting lines.  She does a fair bit of singing throughout over lighter layered moments in the album.  Then a higher pitched male joins her before slowly morphing into some major key  progressive death metal.  It has this overall happy sounding nature that isn’t usually present in death metal at all.  This changes into minor and gets slower and slower before a keyboard brings in a pretty heavy build, that breaks down quick and slowly gets more and more dense in the amount of pure sound that the band is producing.  Ethan Lane joins the track with a little over a minute left on vocals.  He is a very contrasting vocal style, to me he sounds like a hardcore vocalist being very raw and emotional in his delivery.  

Wandering Wayfarers Woes features Nathan Shower and Ethan Lane.  Nathan Shower plays the trumpet solo that I mentioned earlier!  It comes in a on a Latin groove with acoustic guitars playing and snare drum marching.  The solo really shows off some very good trumpet chops.  At the end the trumpet solo devolves into a keyboard solo before it totally turns into a Freeform section with singing over top.  This abruptly changes into a death metal inspired passage that is rather technical in nature.  Very fast double bass drum, blast beats and tremolo picking.  This turns into an another piano lead Latin section, before a breakdown.  The piano lead Latin comes back before tricking the listener and breakdown even harder.  

“Red Mother, Blue Son” is the opening track of the album and it instantly got me hooked.  I had to do this as my last standout track because, it just has so much going on to get the listener instantly in the frame of mind for this album.  It starts off with some rain drop sounds and then it starts with some ominous singing to get us primed for the album.  The “deathcore” aspects I referred to earlier are heard right off the bat with the vocals on this track, but also is reflected by the drumming and guitar work.  The vocals sound like Scott from Carnifex took his lows and took a metalcore vocalist was doing the mids, it’s fantastic.  This song cycles through riffs of all shapes and sizes with ease.  At some points the riffs are often mirrored with keyboard, the keyboard also takes the lead at some point and the guitar keeps the groove going.  There is an underlying groove throughout this whole track that at times stops and starts, but always, and I mean always, returns.  At around the 4:04 mark in this track there is a really cool jazz, but also almost Latin groove that they use with distortion off.  They keep this going and turn the distortion back on and build up this heavy bone crushing break down.  The next section is one of my favorite passages on the album but it’s short and sweet like most of the riffs that they visit.  It’s fast and heavy with super angular riffs that transition into a melodic super groovy instrumental passage that would make pretty  much every one headbang!

This album is one of the albums of the year for me and I’ve only been listening to it for a week at this point.  I really required giving my full attention to this album the first number of full runs through this masterpiece.  Hearing all of the little nuances, harmonies and background sounds was a task!  I love how absolutely jam packed and dense this whole thing really is.  Even as I sit and listen to this one more time while writing out my final thoughts I am still hearing more layers that I may not have noticed before.  Making a mental map of this is incredibly hard in the best of ways.  For now this has my number two spot on my top albums of the year.  I can very easily give this a 10/10 with confidence.  Now I need to go back and listen to more of this bands offerings and have another group to look forward to when it comes to hopefully future releases.

The band offers all of their music for free with downloads on their Bandcamp, but don’t forget to support them and follow them if you like what you hear! (Links Below)

https://www.luckwontsaveyou.com

https://www.facebook.com/LuckWontSaveYou?mibextid=LQQJ4d

https://luckwontsaveyou.bandcamp.com