So I need an analogy for this review. In a moment of pure genius (at least in my admittedly odd mind), it struck while I was playing one of many useless time killing app’s on my smart phone. Let it be known that when the apocalypse does hit this year as the Mayan’s predicted, we won’t know a fucking thing about it because we will be too absorbed with Angry Birds or whatever your poison is, and a comet smashing into you doesn’t leave much in the way of reaction time, so I predict humanity's demise to be a bit of a shock and surprise (even though its predicted). Anyways, so here I am playing an air traffic control game, working various aircraft into my imaginary pattern as I line them up for landing. Everything is going great when all of a sudden there is a blaring horn in the distance. In a panic, I scramble all of my carefully placed airplanes into holding patterns while a giant ass blimp starts tearing through my airspace in a straight line for landing. It doesn’t give a damn that I am already flooded with other aircraft to land, but rather it declares itself to be bigger and more important than anything I have going at the moment and demands that either I take the time to land it, or it is going to run right over everything else and everyone will die in a fiery death…

So now that you have that image in your head, here is how it relates to the review. There are a ton of young bands that I want to find the time to listen to. My goal is to find the ones I enjoy, and help promote them and get them whatever exposure I can to support their music. But there is only so much time in a day, so I have to pick and choose my targets as time allows. In that sense, these bands are circling around in my head waiting to land (now do you get it?). But then something comes along that absolutely floors me, pushes everything else to the side, and demands my immediate attention. At this particular moment, that band is Optic. With only two songs to their name at the moment these youngsters from New York are taking the template laid out by bands like Dream Theater, Opeth, and Symphony X and throwing them in a blender, yielding a result that is simultaneously heavy, vicious, thought provoking, and somber. I tuned into them thanks to our forums, and tracked them down to their facebook page where their songs are available for download. The results are pretty damn impressive. First is Drown the Earth, a 13 minute epic that any veteran of the scene would be proud to have created. A technical storm, this song takes on a whirlwind of activity, featuring creative riffs and melodic leads midst a balance of well executed clean and death vocals. The players are all very talented, and playing at a level that frankly is surprising given their age and lack of experience (to my knowledge). The second track, Moment of Impact, is an instrumental that takes on a more neo-classical approach. At six minutes in length, it is a relatively short burst of youthful energy compared with the first song, but certainly gives you everything its got in that span. A fairly small appetizer, certainly, but one that I can find very little to criticize and nothing worth mentioning here. I cannot understate how impressed I am that something this impressive came from such a young band. It is surprises like this that keeps restoring my faith in metal's future sustainability.

A short review, but hopefully one that puts Optic on your radar. The next step for these guys is to put out a full length album, and I hope they can create something worthy of the talent and passion displayed here, because anything short of excellent will be a disappointment. That is the bar they have set for themselves. Drop whatever you are doing, find them on Facebook and give them a listen.