Arcadea : The Exodus of Gravity
There’s not much that suggests The Exodus of Gravity, the new record by Arcadea—at best a deliberately shadowy project and at worst an indulgence—has any relation to Mastodon, whose drummer Brann Dailor is a key player. Beyond the record’s resplendently trippy artwork by Skinner (who might edge past Tool collaborator Alex Grey in a visionary-art contest), The Exodus of Gravity hyper-drives into interstellar esoterica and primal (and Primus) weirdness that Mastodon has tactfully avoided throughout their career, even at their most indulgent themselves.
Also categorically dissimilar from Mastodon, Arcadea have apparently played only one gig since forming 10 years ago and took their sweet time—eight years and two months to be precise—to finally return to making music with The Exodus of Gravity. It’s also worth pointing out that the synth-prog trio also features co-founder Core Atoms, a multi-instrumentalist virtuoso renowned for playing a right-handed guitar upside down with his left hand. The third member is newcomer João Nogueira (not to be confused with the deceased Brazilian samba legend of the same name), whose primary role is to keep The Exodus of Gravity more synth-focused than guitar-driven.
Billed as “a futuristic synth-rock odyssey set five billion years in the future, in a world where gravity no longer holds us down — literally or metaphorically — but pulsing with the urgency of now,” Arcadea set the bar a little too high with The Exodus of Gravity. It would seem that the band put more thought into the conceptual sci-fi story they concocted, which alone isn’t enough to buoy tracks like “Fuzzy Planet,” “2 Shells” and “Sparks,” which feel more like sketches than finished songs. Perhaps if Dailor hadn’t busied himself with toy piano, and Atoms with every go-to instrument in the prog arsenal (which includes vocoder, Taurus pedals, mellotron, hammond, theremin and samples), the two talented musicians—who played together three decades ago in a band called Gaylord—would’ve found as much focus as they did when developing the cosmic narrative that underpins the record.
It’s with a degree of pain that I type these these words, but The Exodus of Gravity’s weakest element is Dailor’s lead vocals. While Dailor holds his own singing “Oblivion,” the leadoff track on Mastodon’s Crack the Skye and one of their best songs overall, no moment on The Exodus of Gravity rises up to that high bar. Maybe it’s because he’s too focused on carrying the torch as one of the best contemporary metal and hard rock drummers—or maybe he should’ve put down the toy piano.
Label: Relapse
Year: 2025
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