Ever Forthright returns from the void with fantastic first new release in over 10 years

Wow…. what a time for new releases it’s been lately. There’s so much music coming out right now that I feel like I don’t even have enough time to write about all of it, but I felt I needed to do this one because I’ve been focusing on more metalcore lately instead of true prog metal. Ever Forthright was an insanely talented group back in the early days of progressive djent or whatever you want to call it. They should have been huge, but for some reason didn’t take off like other similar bands (Periphery, for instance). However, such is life, and a lot of amazing and talented bands fade into obscurity with less to show for it than Ever Forthright does.

So let’s get into the new single. It’s called Techinflux, and it’s a ridiculous, characteristically prog, twelve minutes and fifty-one seconds long. I can only speculate at how they came to the decision of their first track being incredibly long, but I assume it went one of two ways. First, they just started writing a song and adding onto it and got carried away with themselves until it became this insane monster of a composition, and no one wanted to shoot it down. Or the second, one of them said ironically that they should release a 12+ minute long song and all of them had a good laugh about it and it slowly became an unironic yearning to do the most prog thing they could. Or maybe I completely missed the mark, who knows.

The song starts with an extended piano section, which honestly reminded me a bit of Kingdom Hearts (don’t tell them I said that). The next “section” of the song is actually pretty long. To me it feels like a long crescendo building up to something big, where the vocals are getting higher and more intense. During this time the instrumentals gave more of a “soaring” feeling, which always makes me think of Icarus Lives! in the chorus section. The build up leads us to some really insane screams by Mike, and a nice syncopated breakdown that sounds pretty cool. Eventually we get even more piano (I’m sensing a pattern here) which turns into a really beautiful slower section of the song, including a softer guitar solo that’s pretty jazz-y. The rest of the song follows another buildup to a strong outro, feeling very powerful and ending on a fading out rhythm as if the song is going on to infinity.

My favorite section of the song is actually only about 10 seconds long or so. Right around the 9:00 mark, Jared Lippi is playing this normal drum pattern between the hi-hat and cross-sticking on snare. It’s super simple, except every other time he hits the cross-stick, he delays the hi-hat hit that should have been simultaneous by a very tiny amount, maybe a 32nd note. I think this is just insanely cool because even for a normal, non-drummer, this probably catches in your ear and makes you think something is messed up on the recording or with playback. It immediately caught my ear and made me smile at how I also got tricked into thinking that spotify was skipping or messing up. I actually had never really heard of Jerad Lippi before, since I was a lot younger and less investigative when I first listened to Ever Forthright. I will say that I’m very impressed with his playing on this track, and obviously the drums are great on the original Ever Forthright album as well. Here’s a video I saw of him playing through the new song (most of it):

So let’s talk about the elephant in the room…. Chris Barretto. First of all, let me just say that Chris is one of my favorite metal vocalists of all time. The guy is legendary and has left his mark on many bands throughout his career. But before we talk about him, I have to explain that he is not the one doing vocals for Ever Forthright anymore; Mike Semesky (ex The HAARP Machine, Intervals) has taken up the reins, and I think he’s going to be a great fit, honestly. Mike is a crazy vocalist too, and his style fits Ever Forthright pretty well. I mean you can already hear from the single that his vocals are a great match. Speaking of Mike’s other projects, I actually also found a little comment from the forums on sevenstring.org by Misha where he said that he just discovered a really great vocalist named Mike Semesky to work with on Haunted Shores, so we can add that to the impressive list of bands he’s been in.

My favorite thing about writing these articles is connecting the dots between different bands and members. It’s like discovering these cool easter eggs in your favorite tv show or movie, whatever. Chris Barretto is someone that I do happen to know a lot about just by accumulating knowledge from friends and anecdotes over time. As many people know, Chris was the third vocalist of Periphery, and he joined after Casey Sobol left the band (but continued to write and record vocals). According to Misha Mansoor, Chris wasn’t very good at writing vocal melodies and wasn’t delivering as a vocalist and that’s why they ended up replacing him with Spencer Sotelo. However, it’s hard to say definitively that it was all Chris’ fault or that what Misha said was 100% true, because we weren’t there. Sometimes band members just don’t mesh well, and it’s probably for the best that Spencer found his way to Periphery and Chris moved on to Ever Forthright and Monuments.

A lot of people don’t know about Friend For A Foe, though. Shortly after leaving Periphery, and sometime around (or during?) his time with Ever Forthright, Chris was frontman of a cool band from DC called Friend For A Foe. through a few degrees of separation (my brother knew someone related to the guitarist or something), I found out about this band and they’re right on par with bands like Ever Forthright and old Periphery. Their album, Source of Isolation, is really solid, and if you’re one of those people who just really loves Chris Barretto’s vocals, then there’s some more fresh music for you.

Anyway, Chris not only is a talented vocalist, but also an incredible saxophonist. He plays saxophone on several tracks from the Ever Forthright self-titled album, and really brings that experimental jazz feel to the band. I also heard an anecdote from Craig Reynolds on his podcast that once at a Monuments concert, Chris showed up and said he was losing his voice, but instead would just play saxophone to replace vocal melodies. I honestly think that might be an even cooler experience than just seeing him perform live normally… it’s at least a unique experience for sure. A few years ago I went through a huge Tesseract phase and was listening to Altered State (their best album for sure) and there’s a few really great saxophone parts on there. After I did some digging, I found out that they actually all flew to New York to get Chris to record saxophone on that album. So the guy is obviously gifted and that’s like the ultimate feature to have on a song.

Alright so I just spent a long time rambling about Chris Barretto when this post is supposed to be about Ever Forthright. It’s been a long time since a really cool band in this space has gotten some traction, especially because the bands that pioneered the sound have changed pretty drastically over the years. I personally really loved the sound from the first Intervals album with Mike Semesky, as well as The HAARP Machine. In fact, that Intervals album with Mike is the only thing I like from the band (I previously mentioned all of the Intervals drama on my post about Anup Sastry and other underrated prog drummers). It’ll be both nostalgic and refreshing to get a new wave of that dissonant, ancient-sounding prog metal. Also let me clarify what I mean when I say “ancient-sounding.” I don’t mean that it sounds like it was made in ancient times (obviously), I’m referring to the overall vibe that kinda sounds like music that would be playing while I’m raiding an Egyptian tomb looking for lost treasure, ya know?

I am super excited to hear what else Ever Forthright has in store for us. They apparently have been working on the upcoming album for several years, but have just hit a lot of roadblocks in the process. Around the release of this new single, they also uploaded some old demos to Spotify for everyone to enjoy. I haven’t gotten around to listening yet but I hope there’s some unreleased stuff on there (not just demos of already released songs). Anyway, it looks like they have some new merch up in their store, and check out their Facebook page where they’ve been posting some cool videos about the new material! There’s also a sweet visualizer for the new song up on youtube, so here it is: