If Ray Bradbury decided to form a prog metal band, it would sound like Jupiter Society, and that really wouldn’t be a bad thing. There are several things in common: Bradbury was never one for believing in the benevolence of the unseen, a perspective shared by main Jupiter Society songwriter and keyboardist Carl Westholm. Bradbury enjoyed a sense of dark grandeur in his stories — a tainted nostalgia, if you will — and was not at all worried when his space stories went a little noir, with bad things happening to good people. Westholm’s musical bombast loves the dark corners of minor notes, big choral backups, dramatic shifts from quiet to loud. Both creative minds can be a whole lot of fun.
Featuring several of his former cohorts from Krux, Candlemass and other metal groups, Westholm’s latest outing, Terraform, brings up a new possibility — that there is a thread tying these disparate narratives together. On their debut, First Contact/Last Warning, we had stories of cyborgs who pondered their lack of mortality, vaguely recalling that they were the reanimated dead. We had a merciless hostile invader attacking with no other agenda than to kill human life, and the album closed with a song about a survivor of a spaceship attack — but not for long, as he’s in his lifesuit, drifting slowly toward a sun. On Terraform’s second song, “Rescue And Resurrection,” that same survivor is rescued on the brink of death, then turned into a cyborg himself. The story of the unseen predator is revisited as well, only now the hunter is the hunted on “Beyond These Walls You Are Not My Master.” (more…)
Robbie Robertson coined a phrase in an interview once, and it stuck with me. He said that even though he’d written many types of songs, the ones that always got to him and stayed with him were, if I recall correctly, “skin creepers.”