Weapons of Math Destruction – NinémiA (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

I always think you can only really get to the heart of what a band is all about and where they are coming from when you hear them on album. One song, or even a series of singles listened to weeks, or even months, apart, as I have done with this band, gives a good, but only scattered, impression of the band. But it is only when listening to a series of sequenced and selected tracks, in this case ten, designed as a collective body of work, to sit in unison, that you really understand the sonic landscape they are building.

To say that NinémiA is just another heavy metal band would be to sell them short. Yes, it is immediately apparent right out of the gate, as Psychotropic Plague opens the album, that they deal in big and bold, bombastic and brutal music, but that is only half the story. If that! Many bands would play such sonic cards to sound tough or somehow dangerous, as if volume and velocity alone were enough. NinémiA uses these forces to more worthy ends, to build anthems, create whole new sonic worlds, and deliver powerful and poignant messages. Yes, it is music to make you feel, but it is also music to make you think, and that is a rarity in the heavier realms these days.

And the music is as smart and exploratory as the lyrics that they carry. For every slow, rumbling, depth-charge sound, such as the opener, there are furious groovers as with the track that follows it, The Acquired Savant. Dust to Stars also reminds us that all rock music comes from the same wellspring as it proceeds to build a bridge between melodic, old-school heavy metal and nu-metal and then between nu-metal and progressive rock, music that is both the sound of tectonic plates grinding musically together and the wisdom of the ages being imparted on the listener. At the same time, the whole thing is rendered into a symphonic, almost Wagnerian delivery.

There is also room for more understated pieces, relative to what has gone before, Oppenheimer forging its way forward with a sense of spatial awareness and a blend of grace and grandeur.

This truly global band has members from Cyprus, Poland, and Belorussia united in a common cause. That cause is to remind people that heavier music can also be intelligent, that rock and metal still have something important to say, in short, that music can be big and clever. Weapons of Math Destruction can be seen as a musical template and an academic manifesto to such ideals.