Riverside - ID.Entity (2023) [Deluxe]

Pop psychology has always moved big money with stories and strategies and tricks of the trade for keeping one’s chin up even through the most trying of times. Heck, some of the world’s most enduring aphorisms (‘Tis better to have loved and lost…) and metaphors (the glass is half full) are steeped in the idea that… well, the sun will come out tomorrow. But, if we’re being honest, nobody in the history of undying optimism said it better than ol’ Brian’s buddy up there on that cross.

For the majority of their 21 years, Poland’s Riverside has identified most closely with poor old downhearted Brian. (But, hey, don’t we all sometimes!) In fact, over the course of seven full length albums and an assortment of extras with live renditions and reinterpretations, this is a band whose brooding and melancholic progressive metal has come to symbolize emotional isolation and disconnect better than most in their sphere. Just look at the album covers and compare the music and moods within.

After the debut trilogy established the band as a force of prog’s emotional dark side by merging the creativity of Porcupine Tree with the deep atmospherics of Marillion, Anno Domini High Definition blew it all up, its desperate anxiety coursing through the melancholy like the river rips through the desert with overdue rain. Then Shrine of New Generation Slaves found a comfy groove in the grayness between emotions, Love, Fear and the Time Machine contemplated life with quiet skepticism, and Wasteland lamented death with the deep growl of grief.

The common thread has always been negative emotion, difficulty and strife, and the album art has conveyed that so well, but look up there again at the art for this newest album. It’s white and bright and the lines and shades convey a new energy, especially the active redness around the subject’s head. And look at those eyes. They’re glowing white, reflecting… what? We don’t know! But the album’s title gives us a big ol’ clue to the significance of that blank canvas stare: ID.Entity.

From the Riverside official website, referring to the new single, “Self-Aware”: “Has the dam of sorrow, darkness and mourning finally broken? Yes. With this song we are finally drawing the line and leaving all that in the past. We were already really tired of it. Fuck it. We don’t care what some will think, let’s do it, let’s have fun with it. What do we have to lose? Career? :))”

Immediately out of the gate this is a band focused on a new kind of energy, reaching out to its influences for inspiration and to great effect. In this lead single, Rush is the obvious reference but there’s so many more across the album from The Police, Pet Shop Boys, and Duran Duran to Tears for Fears and Talk Talk. What the hell is going on?! Against expectations based on Riverside’s long history, it’s stark, really, and disconcerting, but the kind of surprise that brings a smile to your face (unless you’re the recalcitrant sourpuss in your circle, in which case please take your rotten eggs to the far corner. We’ll be here savoring the sweetness of optimism. Don’t worry, we can still smell your stupid eggs; we know they’re real enough).

Sometimes when a band makes this kind of change (and especially when it references an era like the 80s), the change is made superficially and maybe only on a song or two. But the new feel here runs throughout the new album because ID.Entity isn’t referencing a decade or even its popular sound, at least not only. Rather (and this is so important), Riverside is referencing a feeling, and the sounds of the 80s happen to capture that feeling exceedingly well: energetic, light, bright, carefree, and fun.

Of course, the 80s weren’t that long ago so we remember they were also a time of hollow materialism and societal exclusivity and sometimes genuine ugliness and ID.Entity absolutely reflects those shades, as well, with knowing contemporary strokes. The overriding theme of the album is positive, and yet anything but a thin reproduction of bygone plastic happiness; rather, it’s focused on identity, individual and collective, and human beings’ everlasting struggle to know and understand themselves in relation to those around them. So, even in the wash of nostalgia and uplifting sounds, founders Mariusz Duda (vocals, bass) and Michał Łapaj (keyboards, Hammond organ) remember the sound of reality is heavy and exciting and sometimes uncomfortable. Relative newcomer Maciej Meller, brought into the fold after the sad passing of the band’s co-founder and wonderful guitarist Piotr Grudziński, brings a sharper edge and brighter energy to much of the heavier riffing.

Opening track, “Friend or Foe?,” feels absolutely brand new with shiny electronic keys and thrumming synth and guitar tones that reflect Rush’s headlong plunge into the 80s (Meller’s solo in “Self-Aware” is unabashed homage). Later synth sounds recall Pet Shop Boys and even Duda’s first few sung lines appear to be channeling some 80s pop/new wave band you know but just can’t quite remember. In fact, if you were to put this song on for an unaware Riverside fan, she wouldn’t begin to suspect until Duda sings at about two minutes and she still wouldn’t be sure until the song hits its second verse 30 seconds later. By that time it’s clearly Riverside, Duda’s voice more familiar again and Michał Łapaj’s keys and Hammond piping behind like the voice of an old friend. A mid-song bridge drops to lay a heavy riff and a later melodic lead from Meller drives it home: this is the Riverside you know and yet not. Like a loved one returned after years away; their face is familiar but there’s someone different behind those eyes “Big Tech Brother” suffers from a bit of cringe in the form of a mock PSA from faux AI, but it’s a familiar cheesiness that fans have come to know and appreciate as sincere nerdiness. And the remainder of the song is a clinic in heavy prog from a spirited synthesized big band intro in complex time to a layered and intersecting song structure and especially in the latter third where they stretch things out on the hooks of intense riffing from Meller in what we can only hope is a glimpse into Riverside’s future. It’s fresh and fiery and infectious the way ADHD was and similarly leaves the listener begging for more.

“The Place Where I Belong,” as the album’s centerpiece, is the best representation of the band’s transformation, and maybe the best reflection of where Riverside is at after a period of personal loss and late global disillusionment. The 13 minute epic composition courses through the band’s full career, from the modern Floydisms of the early work to the pensive melodic reflections of the later albums and even the swinging bluesiness of Shrines. Reflective, yes, but eminently intrepid in its introspection, the band willing – eager even – not to simply revisit their past but to reinterpret it honestly. The song’s capstone is its wonderful closing sequence, as fresh for Riverside as it is familiar to anyone who appreciates the roots of Progressive Rock and especially the seminal symphonic rock variations of Andy Latimer and Peter Bardens of Camel.

Last Rites staffers do a lot of chatting behind the scenes, asking a lot of dumb and very important questions about life and heavy metal and discussing them to sometimes absurd length. A recent query wondered about the boldest moves made by heavy metal bands over the years, whether it turned out well or honked dog shit. Most of our responses involved old school bands (Black Sabbath firing Ozzy, Celtic Frost’s Into The Pandemonium, etc.), which of course makes total sense, but this album by Riverside surely deserves to be in the discussion among modern bands. The shift in tone and texture represents no mere flight of fancy but an instance of real identity transformation as reflected so perfectly by (what I think are) Duda’s words up there; this is a group of renowned journeymen who’ve decided that, even in the serious business of prog metal, there’s real value in (also) looking on the bright side of life. That they manage the metamorphosis without losing the recognizable essence of Riverside speaks to the authenticity of their muse.

Among prog fans, few groups hold such pride of place as Riverside; within a genre that many of its detractors criticize for emphasizing style and technicality over substance, the Polish group have consistently produced music teeming with powerful emotion. A recent history beset by tragedy and setbacks has given good reason to further explore emotion and identity, which Riverside have very much done on ID.Entity, a record that looks both back towards their roots and also ever onward.

The early material of Riverside in their first decade as a band lingered on the boundary between prog rock and prog metal, with both tender levity and heaviness used to accentuate the overwhelming atmospheres and melancholic aura within what have come to be recognized as classic modern prog records. The 2010s saw change, first with a gradual shift towards a generally softer writing approach on Shrine Of New Generation Slaves and Love, Fear And The Time Machine, and then more dramatically with the tragic passing of guitarist Piotr Grudziński in 2016 at the young age of 40. The remaining trio took stock before eventually pressing forward with Maciej Meller as a live guitarist, who subsequently become a full member following the release of Wasteland, on which vocalist/bassist Mariusz Duda played guitar. While still featuring plenty of softer material, Wasteland did have a bit of a harder edge to it than Love, Fear And The Time Machine, intriguingly setting the stage for where Riverside would move next now with Meller fully in the mix.

The only advance single for ID.Entity that I listened to was the opening song, “Friend Or Foe?”, and based on it alone, I had a quiet expectation that this new album would end up being an expansion on the softer, simpler, ‘poppier’ songwriting choices that appeared on Love, Fear And The Time Machine. This wouldn’t have been problematic by any means; the 80s synthpop keyboards and electronics on this song are an intriguing element, and the track, while not massively impressing me, is still very pleasant. There are other moments on this album that are in keeping with the prediction I had, most notably the reggae rhythms in passages of “Self-Aware” that, along with some of the song’s guitar work, draw slight parallels to 80s Rush. However, there is one riff in “Friend Or Foe?” that has a bit of bite to it, and it is this riff that ultimately reveals more about what the rest of the record has in store.

Duda spoke in the build-up to the record’s release about how anger and frustration over current events make it harder to write so tenderly about love and friendship, and that this frustration, plus changes in how the group were writing songs, inspired a shift in songwriting focus towards the band’s earlier material. This change becomes immediately apparent on “Landmine Blast”, a glorious early album cut that, between the pulsating bass, the harder riffs, and the very Grudziński-esque atmospheric guitar leads, has so much of Rapid Eye Movement and Anno Domini High Definition about it. Hearing this song for the first time pretty much instantly altered my excitement and expectations for the rest of ID.Entity, and there are frequent passages across the rest of the album that confirm this as the hardest Riverside record since Anno Domini High Definition, most notably the crunching riffing in the closing minutes of “Big Tech Brother”, the bruising metallic nature of “Post-Truth”, and the brooding “I’m Done With You". However, it’s not just heaviness that harkens back to the 2000s; arguably my favourite aspect of Riverside’s music was Grudziński’s beautiful guitar leads, and while Meller is certainly not just rehashing Grudziński’s work, that lead guitar lushness is more present here than on the previous two outings (see the solo in “Post-Truth” for a good example).

Something else that also stands out far more on this album than on ID.Entity than on Wasteland is Duda’s bass; perhaps having to write for both stringed instruments last time out prevented him giving as much attention to the bass arrangements, but this time out, both its place in the mix and his adventurous playing mean that it draws the attention far more, with “Post-Truth” and “Self-Aware” further great examples of this on top of “Landmine Blast”. The funkiness of the bass in “Self-Aware” and its ska/reggae passages is something that sounds great not just due to being a return to a previous period of the band’s history, and ID.Entity is not just great due to serving as an exercise in nostalgia; parallels can arguably be drawn between most of the highlight songs/moments on this album and those found on the first four records, but this still feels like an album reintegrating former strengths from their past into their present and the growth they've undergone in between, rather than one relying on former glories.

Having said all these positives, the unbridled enthusiasm I had for ID.Entity on first listen has nevertheless still been tempered with repeat plays, for a few reasons. The interview I linked earlier mentioned the album being influenced by anger over ‘big tech, populists, corporations...’; the ‘manifesto’ piece for Duda’s current outlook is the 13-minute “The Place Where I Belong”. Now, I’m normally not one to place too much importance on lyrics; hell, most times, I barely acknowledge them. However, when they’re so audible and so central to a track as they are on song, it’s hard to ignore them, particularly when the contents are delivered in such an un-poetic manner, and really, the lyrics of this song are the kind of base, surface-level ‘modern world is bad’ asininity that you would expect from Robb Flynn, not the band that have written lyrics as touching and thoughtful as those on, say, “Left Out” or “Escalator Shrine”.

It would be fine if the surrounding music was exceptional, but considering the almost incomparable brilliance of Riverside’s previous plus-ten-minute songs, “The Place Where I Belong” really is not all that interesting; an acoustic/rock/acoustic structure is the backbone of a song that sounds closer to Porcupine Tree than anything else I can remember the band producing, and while the end solo is pretty nice, the other instrumentation is pretty run-of-the-mill for either Riverside or Porcupine Tree. Although it would be a very short album without it, I feel ID.Entity would possibly be a better one without “The Place Where I Belong”, and given how extraordinary their longest songs have previously been, this is a disappointment. However, it’s not the only gripe I have with this new album; “Big Tech Brother” similarly dabbles with cringe during its opening sample, and I have struggled to particularly gel with the first half of this song, both vocally and instrumentally, along with occasional moments scattered across the rest of the record.

ID.Entity is a really exciting record to hear Riverside coming out with, and gives good signs for a fruitful journey going forwards with Meller on board. There are some really strong songs here; the only slight frustration I have with it is that the aspects of it that hold it back from being as great as I want it to be are quite glaring, but despite this, ID.Entity has pleasantly exceeded my expectations and reinvigorated my excitement for the band.

Exact Audio Copy V1.6 from 23. October 2020

EAC extraction logfile from 31. January 2023, 23:55

Riverside / Id.Entity Cd1

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Read mode : Secure
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Read offset correction : 6
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000

Used output format : Internal WAV Routines
Sample format : 44.100 Hz; 16 Bit; Stereo


TOC of the extracted CD

Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
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2 | 7:28.47 | 4:50.17 | 33647 | 55413
3 | 12:18.64 | 7:23.66 | 55414 | 88704
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7 | 44:27.62 | 8:43.23 | 200087 | 239334


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Peak level 97.1 %
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Range quality 99.9 %
Test CRC ABA5D3E0
Copy CRC ABA5D3E0
Copy OK

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AccurateRip summary

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None of the tracks are present in the AccurateRip database

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