It’s always a good sign to see Aziola Cry still kicking more ass and taking names when it comes to complexity and carrying the torch to see where this Chicago-based trio are following it up with their latest album, Dysphoria Ritual. Released on Trey Gunn’s label 7D Media, their fourth studio album is a conceptual story told through instrumental passages of a person’s sent into isolation, confinement, misery, and going insane.
Often one of their most ambitious albums, it has proven that the trio have carried out their mission in this darker passageway with emotional narrative structures that is on their next release. For Jason Blake, Tommy Murray, and Mike Milaniak, they have carried throughout the next journey with metallic structures, insane time changes, and Crimson-like motifs that are waiting for you to put the puzzle pieces together in its right place.
These compositions within the six tracks that is on here, blend in their maturity and distinctive voices throughout their arrangements. It has become this massive stick of dynamite, ready to explode at any second to see where the trio will go into next. Yes, we know about the Tool sound that flows massively into their instruments. There is that, but we don’t want to compare Tool to them because that would be too much of a cop-out.
There are the darker textures which flow inside the heart of loony bins, Arkham Asylum, and the madness that flows well beneath those doors, not knowing when the criminals in Gotham City would break free and go in this crazy attack-like mode, robbing banks, torturing people just for fun in the realms of this Clockwork Orange-like scenario, and hurting someone else’s family.
Aziola Cry puts you right in the heart of the chaos occurring with your very eyes in the DC Comics universe which will make it wider and jaw dropped to see whether it’ll be Harley Quinn, Joker, Two-Face, or Poison Ivy who is now the mayor of Gotham City, ordering a hunt to take down the Dark Knight and the Bat-Family while partnering with the corrupt Commissioner, Vandal Savage.
They have created this alternate soundtrack in a way Ivy and Savage are destroying the city like a ton of bricks collapsing in front of our very eyes, and the gasoline is spreading like crazy, not knowing when it will end. I hope there are more inventories, and more structured values with its complexity on where that came from on Dysphoria Ritual. And we hope that the trio will have more tricks up their sleeve in the weeks, months, and years to come.
