After the occasional teaser and taste of new material, Guwahati alt metal band Lucid Recess are out to make a mark again with their third album Alive and Aware. By an easy estimate, they’ve spent about three years working on this, appearing on and off on the national radar, whether it’s with a music video for ‘Changes Are Sold’ or performing at Ziro Festival of Music in 2012 in Arunachal Pradesh.

They’ve been around since 2004 and to remain memorable enough to be booked at the Bacardi NH7 Weekender in Shillong to launch Alive and Aware proves that Lucid Recess are still very much relevant. While they had a nu-metal edge with songs like ‘The Maze’, off their 2007 release Carved and morphed into a no-frills grunge/metal band on 2010’s ‘Socially Active Warrior’, there’s a bit of reinvention at hand with Alive and Aware. If you like bands like The Contortionist and Oceansize, the first thing you’ll notice on this album, straight from songs like ‘Dead Deep End’, ‘Wireless Junkies’ and the aptly-titled ‘Madness’, is drummer Partha Boro’s clockwork drumming. If you thought Pangea’s Jai Row Kavi had intricate drum fills, you need to hear Boro adding an entirely different level of technical prowess on this album.

The three-member band, also comprising brothers Amitabh on vocals/bass and Siddharth Barooa on guitars, sound ridiculously skilled, proving their DIY worth by writing, recording, mixing and mastering everything on their own. Our only grouse with this one – it would take an ardent fan or a very patient listener to get through this 11-track album in one sitting. Most songs average at five minutes and while the band’s intricate prog leanings shine on ‘Metamorphosis’, by the second half of the album, you might become a bit bored of the same formula, no matter how insane Boro’s work behind the drum kit gets. There’s some redemption with their frenetic single ‘Changes Are Sold’ and the ballad-esque ‘What Made This Burn’, but the rest of the album doesn’t grip you the same way it did when it kicks off.

The prog element, especially the layers that give Lucid Recess a great sound, will make listeners stay, rewarded by a 10-minute epic closer ‘Sphere of Nothingness’, but it still doesn’t change the fact that Alive and Aware stays fresh only for a while.

Buy the album on Instamojo. Watch the video for 'Dead Deep End'