To many outside the rock and metal fraternity, the music of those collected genres is often viewed as being a bit low-brow. It is seen as loud music made by hairy musicians with fantasy and sci-fi fixations and is generally looked down on by those making music in more refined realms. But, as this latest release from NinémiA neatly demonstrates, nothing could be further from the truth.

With Dr Oppenheimer, NinémiA shows us that rock music can be every bit as powerful and poignant lyrically as the music which propels it. Here, this nine-minute epic wrestles with the legacy of the man’s work. His atomic science advancements opened up new fields of study and handed science the key to worlds of quanta and quarks. It also ushered in the age of the atomic bomb in two unholy acts of obliteration and genocide. Deep, shocking and contemplative stuff.

And as always, the music is dynamic and flexible, twisting and turning through guitar crescendos and spoken word lulls, from ornate drum patterns to pummeling bass lines and intense vocal salvos to epic and gracefully turned tunes. It has everything that the rock fan needs whether you are a prog-rocker, a lover of technical guitar work, symphonic metal or good old fist-in-the-air, foot-on-the-monitor, classic rock. It is all here in one epic soundtrack.

Across a series of singles that have come my way recently, I have quickly grown to appreciate the complexities and clever creations, the elegance and eloquence of NinémiA. My only question is this. Why isn’t the band much, much bigger? Why isn’t it a household name? Still, with the quality of the music they are turning out, it probably isn’t a question that I will be asking much longer.

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Musician, scribbler, historian, gnostic, seeker of enlightenment, asker of the wrong questions, delver into the lost archives, fugitive from the law of averages, blogger, quantum spanner, left footed traveller, music journalist, zenarchist, freelance writer, reviewer and gemini. People have woken up to worse.

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