CORAL THE MERKNIGHT VS. SEARANTULA – It Weaves A Web Of Metal

This solo project by the artist known as Coral the Merknight, featuring numerous guest appearances by Darkest Hour’s Travis Orbin and Ghost Ship Octavius’ Adōn Fanion, while seeming to be lacking a clear sense of direction and purpose, manages to delivery an impressive array of Progressive Metal elements well blended with an unapologetically metal attitude and sensibility.

It Weaves a Web of Metal spins it’s ways through a variety of approaches ranging from parody style material in the vein of Steel Panther, Lords of the Trident or GWAR, to more straight-faced tracks that are not too far removed from the more accessible Prog Metal bands like Withem or Between The Buried and Me. Certainly, fans of the Progressive Metal genre will gravitate towards this release somewhat easily.

“Tragedy” is a singular track which could easily represent the album as a whole. With a running time of six minutes, it mixes both the more serious Progressive Metal instrumentation with a lyrical delivery that bounces from a goofy, spoken word style to a nicely sung Modern Metal approach. This highlights what it perhaps the main weakness of this release: its lack of consistency and direction. Just when you are ready to laugh at or with them, the songs shift and seem to expect to be taken seriously. These unpredictable changes keep the audience guessing, perhaps not in a good way. When you compare this to a release from a band like Steel Panther, which just focuses on light-hearted, party material 100% of the time, it becomes clear why parody acts can be so difficult to execute successfully.