As I said before when reviewing You’re Still Saving Me, there are a lot of opposites attracting in Relentless Pursuit’s music, many sonic worlds colliding, and many sounds and styles being put together in new and exciting ways. This new album really shows us the broadness of the sonic spectrum that Matthew Konradt, the man behind the project, works with.
Essentially this is a rock and classical meeting of musical minds. But even that isn’t really enough to do things justice. The rock element runs from gentle rock balladry to screamo slabs of possessed vocals: the classical component is built from the ebbing a flowing of gentle strings and chiming piano. Opposites? Indeed. Attractive? Absolutely.
Rock music, especially that which tips over into the more technical and progressive realism, as the music found here does, has its own raw, inherent beauty, able to create the lulling lows and searing crescendos to create the necessary symphonic dynamics and epic deliveries. But the inclusion of the more classical tones, the interludes that often top and tail the individual tracks or break into the songs at unexpected points, add something special to the proceedings.
The One wanders into some progressive pastures, a song built of many musical parts, switching between metallic onslaughts and subtle interludes, anthemic passages and depth-charge backbeats, Illusion as about as fast and technical as such music comes, and To Preserve is almost claustrophobic in its weight.
But there is much else to explore between the classical dexterity and the thunderous deliveries, not least the disco grooves in Crush and the cinematic soundtrack vibes of Sound of Paradise.
Relentless Pursuit is a fascinating project that crosses boundaries and merges music from opposite ends of the scale, which merges musical ideas that have little business being in each other’s company but work so well. But that is precisely how music evolves and moves forward, right?
