When I first heard Raphael Weinroth-Browne’s music after hearing his collaboration between Aziola Cry’s Jason Blake on the EP entitled Candles Burn, it was one of those EPs that caught me off-guard in my 2024 review of the album on Echoes and Dust. This wasn’t just a mind-blowing EP, it was like as I’ve mentioned before, walking on this massive tightrope in the middle of the Grand Canyon.
Now, in 2025, the Canadian maestro has come back swinging with his new album Lifeblood. This was, according to the Limelight article in issue 164 from PROG Magazine by Cheri Faulkner on page 21, a decade’s worth of material, appealing to a broad audience. “I want listeners to feel like they’ve gone on a journey and come out a little different”. Browne describes about the album.
And that’s what Lifeblood is, a journey into the unknown. Not realising the danger that comes, and pushing it to the progressive core beyond our stratosphere. You feel as if you’re inside a video game, in the worlds of Blasphemous, BioShock, the Dead Space franchise, and Cronos: The New Dawn.
Browne is visioning the music like a video game score inside his head when it comes to Lifeblood. Take for example, the climatic, turned intense cello thunderstorm behind ‘Ophidian’, you feel as if you’re right in the middle of a boss battle in the hearts of a post-apocalyptic wasteland of Poland in the Cronos-era where the Traveler endures another intense battle with humans into monsters known as ‘Orphans’.
‘Pyre’ feels like a disturbing meditation gone awry as we witness the flames, burning buildings, and the corruption that comes with it of a city gone wrong, and townsfolk turned into vicious, drug addicts, preparing to take down the emperor and rule the city with an iron fist. And it ain’t going to be pretty folks! ‘Nethereal’ has this intense percussion pounce that’ll take you the Viking-era. Cellos and laced with its haunting rain-dropping pour, prepping for battle. Think if you will, Heilung’s arrangements, but with a sense of decay, blood-red background, and the hope for peace is far off into the distance.
But it’s the droning turned meditated atmosphere behind the ‘Winterlight’ that gives it the spark of letting go of the past and the present, and moving on into the future to see where the next chapter in your life awaits. It’s Raphael’s mournful beauty that hits hard, going into unexpected locations, but making it feel somewhat safe from the chaos that’s going on above street levels.
Intense, classical, and post-apocalyptic, Lifeblood fills the heaviness into the void of unknown parallel universes that pushes listeners into opened doors to see what chances you will take and how you will change your own timeline. And the result, it is up to you that figures out what to do next.
