Morir Saltando by Hesse Kassel

For fans of Black Country, New Road, Or Sobre Blau, The Mars Volta, the Chilean experimental rock scene, and the understanding of all mass cultural crisis as inherently spiritual, Morir Saltando by Hesse Kassel assesses meta modern struggles using a brand of prog rock with ample crossover into today’s popular sounds of delicate post rock. If you’re looking for that guitar-shredding virtuosity, you’ll find plenty of that here, but these moments of flashy soloing mostly play second fiddle to overarching emotional crescendos much more familiar to today’s underground rock listener. The band’s position within a scene with deep connections to the noisy online diy space also shines through here, with dramatic vocal explosions marking the high points of these gradual aesthetic swells. Such extreme and intimate bursts of emotion don’t always correlate with progressive rock aesthetics, with the headiness of prog rock oftentimes rejecting the carnal release of those extreme punk-derived sounds. However, the thrashing about of our spirits has become physically damaging, something expressed most accurately through an explosion both carnal and complex.