Band:	Humanotone
Album:	A Flourishing Fall In A Grain Of Sand
Style:	Progressive stoner metal
Release date:	March 2022

01. Light Antilogies
02. Ephemeral
03. A Flourishing Fall
04. Scrolls For The Blind
05. Beyond The Machine
06. Even Though

Do you like Elder? Do you like Weedpecker? If you answered 'yes' twice, then you will like Humanotone.

A Flourishing Fall In A Grain Of Sand is the sophomore full-length release from Humanotone, a one-man progressive stoner project from Chile. The man behind the project, Jorge Cisternas, evidently has wide-ranging tastes within metal, as his other project Sunvher veers more towards blackgaze. Sunvher’s debut record, released in 2020, actually served as a pause in the creation of A Flourishing Fall…, according to Bandcamp; the initial ideas for this record formed between 2017 and 2019, and only began to take more concrete form after Sunvher was finished. It’s hard to say without hearing the original concepts how much the stylistic detour influenced the end product, but however A Flourishing Fall… came to be, the end result is evidently all the better for it.

Now, I’ve made what I consider to be the closest comparisons to Humanotone very clear in the opening of this review, but there’s more to this album than just those two groups. The prog rock influence on the album, particularly with the presence of the keyboards, sends my mind to Vokonis and their album from last year, while heavier portions of opener “Light Antilogies” give me Spaceslug vibes. There’s also a melancholic touch that comes through on tracks such as “Ephemeral”, particularly influenced by the vocals, that send my mind to Loviatar, and there’s likely other loose comparisons I could make when trying to summarize the spread of ideas on this album.

Nevertheless, Elder and Weedpecker are the most natural comparisons; just listen to those clean guitar tones at the beginning of “A Flourishing Fall” and tell me you don’t get those vibes. Now, I love Elder and Weedpecker, so the smooth, mellow, long-form proggy stoner/psychedelic jams on this album are completely up my alley, and Cisternas has really got a solid grasp on how to effectively write this music. Listening to “A Flourishing Fall” and getting strong Lore and Weedpecker III vibes just highlights how underwhelming Weedpecker’s album from last year was, where this evocative smoothness was lacking. “Scrolls For The Blind” doubles down on those Weedpecker jam vibes, with some sumptuous guitar work across the song.

When Humanotone depart from that Elder/Weedpecker template, it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the dirty stoner gruffness of “Beyond The Machine” doesn’t quite work for me, although the fact that this song is both the shortest on the album by a considerable distance and still finds time for some lush soloing means that it’s not much of an issue. I also feel like the brief moments of more extreme metal and vocals on closing track “Even Though” are a bit out of place when set against the rest of the record. On the flip side, the bubbly energy of the chorus of “Even Though” really wins me over; it sounds like what the best version of Brann Dailor singing over a stoner rock groove for Mastodon could sound like (unlike, say, “Show Yourself”). The vocals in general are arguably the weakest aspect of A Flourishing Fall In A Grain Of Sand for me; the breathy haziness of Cisternas’ tone doesn’t always quite click for me. However, it’s part and parcel of being a one-man project, and the vocals could certainly sound far worse, and in any case, half the songs have huge multi-minute stretches of purely instrumental music anyway.

In the past couple of years, I’ve made a habit out of mentioning in the review of a stoner metal album that I’ve fulfilled my annual quota of discovering one great new stoner metal band. It would be a shame if nothing else new emerged in the genre that rivaled this record, but if A Flourishing Fall In A Grain Of Sand ends up being the quota-filling discovery and best stoner metal record of this year, it would be a worthy winner; this is a really lovely album.