Mainline Riders, Air Dancers, and Psychic Warriors – Bygone's debut album out in December via Svart Records Boston based heavy metal act Bygone's self-titled debut album lands via Svart Records, ready to soundtrack your cosmic explorations of an imagined past. You could call it hard rock or heavy metal, but on this LP it's probably closest to Métal Hurlant. This is hardly the first slab of molten black and silver forged by the members of the band, who have previously traveled the Iommic byways of configurations like Magic Circle, Blazon Rite, Concilium, Witchtrial, and Missionary Work. Here, they join together to forge new routes through the whirlpool where matter vanishes. The album’s lead single Take Me Home builds a galloping call and response between dual guitar leads and nimble keyboard lines, while its lost-in-space lyrics yearn for a more pastoral and earthbound existence. An outsider answer to Uriah Heep's John Lawton period or maybe a Taarna-less variation on the Bouchard brothers' "The Pact." Through the album, the group journeys out-of-body with cuts like Lightspeed Nights, Into the Gleam, and Shadow Rising drifting through degenerate stars and iron suns. Hear throughout taut Pete Way-inspired underpinnings, keyboard flourishes reminiscent of Don Airy's late '70s work, and vocals that recall the emotion and grit of Buffalo's Dave Tice. Bygone is an infinite cosmos in a 12" jacket, a heavy metal that feels not so much of the historical past as it does the never-quite-was.
