Album review: Changing Places In The Fire – Changing Places In The Fire

Even before the U.S. administration effected regime change by force in January, Venezuela was in a state of crisis. Amongst the nearly eight million people thought to have fled the country’s crime, poverty and human rights crackdowns were the five musicians who would go on to form Changing Places In The Fire. Now displaced across Europe and South America, they’ve remotely assembled an album that deals eloquently with exile and upheaval.

With more challenges than most bands face, it’s understandable that this self-titled debut wrestles with the complicated emotions that arise from a decision to flee one’s homeland. Sadness and homesickness swirl around defiance and hope throughout, with the lived experience of migration described poetically on The Epiphany Tree. These issues resonate beyond the band members’ specific situation, particularly when The Fury And The Sound harnesses anger against the divisiveness wrought by Big Tech.

The latter tune finds the band engaging with their heaviest setting, but for the most part Changing Places In The Fire fashion an elegant, modern take on prog rock. Their riffs sometimes carry a whisper of Tool or Karnivool, while elsewhere these songs evoke the subtler approach of Porcupine Tree or The Pineapple Thief. Meanwhile, Daz Medrano’s vocals provide a melodic focus that can give the album’s hookier choruses a hint of the way Coheed And Cambria imported a touch of Rush and Genesis into mid-‘00s post-hardcore.

The band’s evidently high levels of musicianship are presented without recourse to flashiness, everything here played in service of the song. But if this understated quality throws up the odd less memorable moment, the very existence of this album remains an admirable triumph against all odds.

Verdict: 3/5

For fans of: Porcupine Tree, Karnivool, Oceansize

Changing Places In The Fire is out now via Wild Thing.