Bedsore : Dreaming the Strife For Love | Album review | Treble (2024)

You would be forgiven if with Hypnagogic Hallucinations, Bedsore‘s acclaimed debut, you were not fully sold on the psychedelia and prog of their offerings. Death metal, it’s worth remembering, has always naturally had hybrids with those styles, with groups as far back and pivotal as Morbid Angel, Crystal Age and Demilich existing within the syrupy, melted-head universe of those sonic spaces. And in this respect, Bedsore’s debut certainly found its kinship, leaning more on that impressionistic wing than to the brutal and precision-engineered worlds of slam or tech death. But, compared to their peers in groups like Tribulation and Blood Incantation, it was admittedly more of a mental stretch, feeling at times closer to a cleaned up take on Tomb Mold’s Manor of Infinite Forms or a somewhat tighter approach to Incantation’s legendarily amorphous death metal. Their follow-up split with Mortal Incarnation, this time a single macro-length song, extended these ideas, internalizing to a single composition what before had been spread across many, but it still felt in many ways gestational or perhaps a style that would always sit on the borderlands between things.

So to my profound delight, Dreaming the Strike For Love emerges in a cloud of bong smoke and Mellotron hum, the iconic tones of a Moog married to guitar work that brings to mind Steve Hackett and Andy Latimer more than Trey Azagthoth and Pat O’Brien. Death metal remains but, just as Blood Incantation has reined in their extreme metal to act more as a compositional element in broader progressive rock material, Bedsore have gone one step further, feeling now more akin to Opeth in their inverted balance. Take note: by my pen, these are positive comments, not in disparagement of death metal, a profound and eternal love of mine, but of equal love for progressive rock, of which I am a notable fan. This is retrogazing work in the extreme, indebted clearly to their esteemed Italian forebears in groups such as Le Orme and PFM, vanguards of a de rigeur prog of a specific Italian flavor of the early to mid-’70s.

Interest in this record will largely hinge on your feelings on being confronted with that fact. Notably unlike Opeth or, more contemporaneously, Blood Incantation, Bedsore is far more unwilling to play catch-up for people approaching this from outside the level of love they currently possess. The interest here is not in breaking new ground (of which there is none to be found) but instead on remarkable and potent genre exercises, replacing what would be heavier hard rock riffs in this material had it been written in the ’70s with the current metallic flair of death metal. That said, this is a record that would see the band better paired on stage with Beardfish and Big Big Train than a slot at Wacken, and it seems the band knows this, using everything from the inspiring material of an Italian speculative angelic text to the band photos in this promo cycle. There is a refreshing honesty here; sometimes artists put themselves on the hook, present themselves as the vanguard of aesthetic development and thought, and so run the risk of being caught up in the necessary repetitions inherent to any work. (There is rarely anything that is purely novel, and avant-garde work to that extreme is often considered, understandably, excessive.)

This may read like disparagement. It is not; it is mere reality. As a fan of progressive rock of this ilk, its hard not to hear a real keenness of study on their part, akin to groups like Astra who later became Birth and their study of first space/psychedelic rock and later the works of Yes. What matters of this record is not presumed broken ground or surprises that do not come but instead its superlative quality. I’ve been writing to this record in a fever since receiving the promo; it bleeds from the psychedelic edge a fervency of image, the same feelings you are supposed to get when you hear the opening strains of a Yes epic and gaze down at that elliptic, evocative Roger Dean artwork. Prog is, at best, image-music, scoring emotionality almost unnamable to image, image to color, color to sound. This is why, like death metal, the lyrics often don’t matter, are there as accents rather than the heart of things. These are the boundless vistas of imagination, a laughing joy, the permanence of color in a world surrendering to fascism.The Italians would know. Their prog scene was one of their vanguards against their second fascist government in the ’70s. There is an evasive political edge to this record, one that avoids sullying itself in specifics to instead conjure that same hazy, threatening atmosphere of the dream. Some may have wanted, perhaps, a more avant-garde and groundbreaking development for the group. For me, this is exactly what I’d hoped they would become, and it is exactly as good as I’d hoped that would be.

Label: 20 Buck Spin

Year: 2024

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