Shadow Circus Returns from the Shadows
The progressive rockers have released their first new album in 11 years, and it's their darkest and heaviest yet.
Thank you for spending part of your day with Michael’s Record Collection. I picked up a bad cold or flu a couple of weeks back, so my apologies for the layoff. I had to push some interviews back during the last couple of weeks (some have yet to be rescheduled, unfortunately).
I’m pleased to bring you this week’s newsletter, however, because it reunited me with an old friend I met on the Spock’s Beard message board a long time ago. John Fontana of Shadow Circus is my guest this week. His band Shadow Circus has just released its fourth studio album, From the Shadows, and although the band’s progressive rock roots shine through, it’s not as overt or frequent, as this is a darker and heavier album than the band has ever released before. It deals more with real-life issues than previous albums too, but the musicianship and hooks are still there.
Let’s get to that story.
It’s been 11 years since East Coast prog outfit Shadow Circus dropped the delightful On a Dark and Stormy Night release, a concept album based on Madeleine L'Engle’s wonderful novel A Wrinkle in Time. Up to that point, the band had released a new album every three years like clockwork, starting in 2006 with debut Welcome to the Freakroom.
After a long layoff, the band has returned in a slightly different configuration with From the Shadows. The band’s fourth album was released digitally on Halloween and the CD orders have recently started shipping out as the group is very much a DIY outfit.
The title is perfect, because it could easily describe the band’s emergence from a long period without a new album.
The new album represents a darker, heavier direction for Shadow Circus, and there’s a notable change in subject matter. While the band previously relied heavily on literary and cinematic influences, such as Stephen King’s The Stand, The Twilight Zone, and the aforementioned L’Engle novel, From the Shadows finds the band looking inward and writing about themselves. This introspective direction was at least partially inspired by the music of Devin Townsend and seeing how his fans reacted to him at a concert.
Much of the subject matter comes from coping with the stuff that was going on a few years ago — pandemic fears, political turmoil, civil unrest, etc. — and the nonstop news cycle about it sapping morale, creating mental fatigue and anxiety, and poisoning the psyche.
Led by the two Shadow Circus mainstays — guitarist John Fontana and lead singer David Bobick — From the Shadows features former Pain of Salvation bassist Gustaf Hielm and drummer Ryan Van Poederooyen of The Devin Townsend Band. (Co-producer Alex Repetti played bass on two tracks — “From the Shadows” and “Pay the Piper.”)
Van Poederooyen’s style alone gives Shadow Circus a bit more bite, but Fontana’s guitar riffs are also crunchier, and a more straightforward, four-piece arrangement allows Shadow Circus to put the emphasis in progressive rock on the “rock” part while still retaining enough of the band’s prog influences to keep the music interesting and stimulating.
The album opens with “Vampires,” the longest track in the bunch with a run time of 7:40. It starts with a macabre musical box sound and eerie keyboards.
“I wanted the opening of this album to sound like what you would want to be playing if you were opening a big, giant, old Grimm’s fairy tale storybook,” Fontana said. “So, hence the musical box and the theme that opens the album.”
When the guitar, bass, and drums kick in, it’s obvious that this is not the same old Shadow Circus. Hired guns Hielm and Van Poederooyen provide a heavy bottom end to the song, while Fontana plays a crunchy riff and solos over it all.
The lyrics relate to the topic of dealing with bullying and use vampires as an allegory for it.
Like vampires in a vacant moonlit night, they prey on me
Like vampires, they feed upon the blood of my misery
The song includes an eerie instrumental middle that starts out sounding like bits of “The Waiting Room” by Genesis on steroids before picking up steam and intensity.
There is probably no better example among the eight tracks on the album of the shift in tone for Shadow Circus. It’s an immediate declaration by the band that this record is going to sound a bit different than what Shadow Circus fans are used to hearing.
“A New Death” is an even heavier track, punctuated with machine-gun double-bass drum strikes, thunderous bass, and growling guitar. Shadow Circus embraces prog metal in this song and Bobick belts out the lyrics, emoting all of the frustration and anger many of us felt during the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020.
“‘A New Death’ is about the mental torment that Dave, the lyricist, and I can relate to and went through during the pandemic,” Fontana said. “Very specifically, it refers to — I don’t want to mention any divisive figures — but it refers to a specific figure who was prominent during that time who was a source of a lot of grief. And the kind of waking up every day, like at the beginning of that (time), it was like, now this person has died from (COVID-19). Now this person has died from it. This person has died from it. So, it was the idea of every day a new death…that was the abuse our psyche was taking.”
“Into the Fire” is a clever song in which Bobick sings from two different points of view.
“‘Into the Fire’ is a dialogue between (Bobick) and his anxiety,” Fontana said. “And he sings from the point of view like he personifies his anxiety. His anxiety is saying, ‘Let’s jump into the fire together. Come on. Let’s ride,’ and taking him on this unpleasant ride. It’s honest. There isn’t a line on this album that he or we haven’t felt.”
The chorus melody is simple and infectious, punctuated with crowd vocal shouts of “Hey!”, and sticks in the mind long after listening. It might be the best Hielm song on the record, with inventive bass parts and a thunderous, driving rhythm. Fontana sizzles through a solo with flourishes of what sound like a talk box that give it a sinister edge. It ends with more crowd sounds — applause, notably, as well as some screams that sound more terrified than euphoric.
“Moonshine Haze” is a skull-crushing, pulsing track about a particular coping mechanism — a specific strain of cannabis. As with “A New Death,” the band dips into heavy metal territory on this one. The middle instrumental section starts out simultaneously dreamy and dark before giving way to a blistering Fontana solo.
“Before, I used to be very protective of my solos and wanting that to be a domain that I had all to myself,” Fontana said. “And Dave has this mystifyingly good ear. It’s like scary good. Since this album we couldn’t go into the studio with a full band and kind of get the live feel of the album, so I would say (to Bobick), ‘Hey come over and let me play solos for you, so at least I’m getting the feeling of a performance, and I’m feeling what it’s like telling a musical story with a solo.’ And he would listen and he’d say, ‘Yes, but in this part it’s a bit fiddly, and it sounds like it could use some direction here.’ So I’d say, ‘OK,’ and then he might say something about another part. Every single piece of feedback he gave me that I actually kind of just gave up my ego and tried turned out way better. At one point I was like, ‘I can’t finish this solo because you haven’t given me feedback on it yet.’”
Fontana opens title track “From the Shadows” with a metallic riff and lays down some nice lead flourishes over it. Van Poederooyen urges the song forward with rapid-fire drumming. Subtle ascending keyboards in the background give the song texture. This one makes the metal lover in me smile every time. Despite the title, this song is one of the lighter ones lyrically, as it’s about emerging from darkness rather than anything lurking there, a message which juxtaposes nicely with the thunderous, almost-menacing music. Bobick’s vocal delivery cuts through the heaviness of the song. In fact, the song ends with him finishing the chorus a capella. If “Vampires” hadn’t been the opening track, this should have been the next in line for that spot, although it completes a trilogy of sorts within the album.
“‘Into the Fire’ is kind of this wrestling with depression, ‘Moonlight Haze’ is kind of the tonic for that depression, and ‘From the Shadows’ was that kind of joy that you can experience when you do have those moments when you overcome the things that are very dark,” Fontana said.
The deep dive into the pain within the inner psyche continues with “Through the Witching Hour (Misery Inside),” another hard and heavy number built on top of stellar bass-and-drum bedrock. Fontana shines again on guitar and some subtle keyboards provide depth and texture. The chorus is relatable and Bobick belts it out with all of the anger and frustration he can muster.
“Pay the Piper” starts out with a gorgeous acoustic guitar part and lovely cello by Matt Masek, which is a welcome palate cleanser after the previous two heavy songs. But the chugging heavy guitar, accompanied by bass and drum, kicks in about a minute and a half into the song. Once past the intro, the song sounds to me like a mixture of grunge and modern heavy prog-metal masters Tool, and it turns out there’s a reason for that.
“Musically the guitar part came from me listening to a lot of Adam Jones from Tool and having that kind of chugging, kind of hammering off kind of guitar part that feels like it’s moving in slow motion, while being kind of tricky at the same time,” Fontana said. “And I had heard the vocal of the chorus in my head. So, I gave Dave the chorus that I heard, and I said ‘This is how the chorus has to go.’”
The song is at least nominally inspired by the story The Pied Piper, as Fontana explained there were some remnants in the final album from an initial idea to create an album of modern stories that tie in to classic fairy tales.
Fontana’s solo absolutely smokes on this song and is one of my favorite moments he’s ever recorded.
The album closes with a tonal shift. “Second Star to the Right” (I think…it’s written out that way on the Shadow Circus Bandcamp site and Tidal, but my promo file says “Second Star from the Right” in the metadata — I assume it’s supposed to be “to”) which borrows its title from Peter Pan. The song is a dreamy, atmospheric piece that somehow doesn’t feel out of place on such a heavy album.
“The ending, ‘Second Star,’ being the one song where I said, ‘That’s a little risky. This is something different,’” Fontana said. “But that one had some significance for me as the last song on the album. Each album has ended on something a little different, and so I thought that was a good thing.”
The song serves as an interesting epilogue to the album. It gives listeners a bit of a sonic “coming down” moment, where one can decompress from the heavy album that came before. It provides a hopeful moment at the end.
Straight on til morning, there’s no looking back
“The story of ‘Second Star’ is important to the whole album,” Fontana said, noting the song title’s allusion to Peter Pan. “So ‘second star to the right and straight on until morning’ is how you get to Never Never Land, where you go and avoid ever aging and ever growing old. The album’s a midlife crisis! The album is ‘I want to play those power chords.’ We’re all getting on in age. We want to rock.”
The song is quite simply one of the band’s greatest achievements, in my view, and has very quickly become one of my favorite Shadow Circus tracks.
The entire album runs just under 47 minutes, refusing to overstay its welcome and leaving the listener wanting more. Shadow Circus treads new ground without completely leaving the old behind. Hopefully, the band’s longtime fans are willing to follow along on this new journey. It may be dark and heavy (a reflection of the times in which it was created), but there are hooks throughout and it’s not hard to find them.
“We felt that this group of songs was telling a good story about this era of our creative lives,” Fontana said.
After living with this album for a couple of weeks, I can say this is my favorite Shadow Circus record. Although I enjoyed the band’s music that leaned on more overtly progressive influences on previous releases, I’m also a sucker for heavy, introspective music like Porcupine Tree’s metal era of In Absentia, Deadwing, and Fear of a Blank Planet. The progressive influences are still in there but they’re wrapped in a crunchier package than on their previous work.
Bobick goes for more power than theatricality with his vocals on From the Shadows — and to great effect — but he’s still quintessentially himself. He’s never sounded better. Fontana continues to develop his craft as a top-notch guitarist, with several jaw-dropping moments. He’s a criminally unknown talent who doesn’t need to take a back seat to anyone when it comes to playing. And Hielm and Van Poederooyen, the hired guns in the rhythm section, add gravitas, explosiveness, and (at times) ferocity to the proceedings.
From the Shadows is a different side of Shadow Circus. It’s raw, honest, and at times brutal, but at the same time it’s also beautiful and personal and cathartic. It may be the band’s best release to date.
Tracklist:
Vampires (7:40)
A New Death (4:51)
Into the Fire (5:06)
Moonshine Haze (6:23)
From the Shadows (6:10)
Through the Witching Hour (Misery Inside) (4:53)
Pay the Piper (5:52)
Second Star to the Right (5:56)
Learn more about Shadow Circus and purchase the new album at shadowcircus.bandcamp.com.
For my full interview with John Fontana, check out the video below or download/stream Episode 129 of the Michael’s Record Collection podcast. In addition to discussing the album, John was kind enough to tell me about the band’s hiatus between releases, his musical beginnings, and much more.
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