We’ve spoken of Instar before, around a year and a half ago to be exact. Back then the project of bassist (and good friend of the blog) Gregory Greenberg was in its nascent stages and only had one track, “We’re Getting Older” (which also happened to feature vocals from Hayato Imanishi of Cyclamen and Heavy Blog contributor and The Omega Experiment creator Dan Wieten). But that one track piqued enough of our interests that we felt compelled to write about it and support him. In fact, one of us felt so compelled by the music that he actually joined on as a contributor to the project. Our very own Eden Kupermintz joined forces with Greg to provide lyrical inspiration as well as his own velvety pipes as narration on one track. After much collaboration and work, Instar’s first official EP is complete and ready for full public consumption, which you should get on pronto!
The two new tracks, “The True Article” and “Evac” are brilliant, featuring a heady mixture of ambient and spacey progressive metal work and ethereal lyrical narration. The former features some beautiful poetry from Sarah Blake and gorgeous narration from Shantel Amundson, cocooned by instrumentals that combine the exciting and frenetic energy of adventure rock such as sleepmakeswaves with a heavier and more technical edge, as well as some beautifully sweet strings at the end. “Evac,” meanwhile, is bookended by Eden’s narration (whose rich Israeli tones should be very familiar to anyone who follows the podcast at all) and is a much more subdued, slow-burner of a song. The track is filled with chunky John Carpenter-esque synths and ponderous guitarwork as guest vocalist Neil Flavelle elevates the space drama of the track, all before it breaks into gorgeous climatic guitar solo. And both tracks flow wonderfully into the aforementioned “We’re Getting Older,” which is still as much a gem as ever.
I’ve been told that this EP is only a small taste of what’s to come, and plans are already in the works for a full-length, so now’s a perfect time to show some support for the group by purchasing the EP from their Bandcamp (which is listed as Name Your Price) and following them on Facebook. Adventure prog ahoy!