Despite virtuosity, Animals as Leaders aim to make prog easy to digest

The sound is many things at once, a Rubik’s Cube of rhythms, complex yet colorful, like the puzzle in question.

There’s no bassist to help bolster the bottom end, but at times you’d swear there was one, with the extended range of eight-string guitars adding a rhythmic heft while at the same time keeping things limber, supplying a forceful bounce that powers things forward.

Think of it as a sleight of hand for the ears instead of the eyes.

The tune in question: “Arthimophobia,” the lead track from “The Madness of Many,” the dizzyingly dynamic new album from instrumental heavy-hitters Animals As Leaders.

On the surface, it’s a head-spinner, opening with what sounds like sitar bolstered by an undercurrent of electronics, before guiding listeners into a maze of ricocheting rhythms, melodic accents supplying the bread crumbs to help guide you through.

Here’s the thing, though, the song’s actually played in 4/4 time, the most standard of time signatures, even though it seems like something far trickier, initially. Utilizing this common rhythmic bedrock enables Animals to create something fresh-sounding from the familiar.

This is their thing: To make prog palatable, easy to digest, even if their playing is intimidatingly virtuosic. You don’t have to have trained ears to dig these dudes — any old ears will do, really, as long as they can withstand a thorough battering.

“We’re definitely aware of trying to come up with something that is easy to grab on to, something that is singable, something that nonmusicians can appreciate,” guitarist Javier Reyes explains. “We’re all fans of highly technical music, but we’re also fans of dance music and pop music, and we’re aware that some of the more memorable music tends to be more pop and less technical, so we try to have some type of balance in our music. As technical as we are, we still want to have something easy to latch on to among the craziness that’s happening in there, because otherwise it would be a bit of a wankfest.”

And with that, Reyes alludes to perhaps the biggest knock on this kind of music: that it’s self-indulgent navel-gazing, a bunch of pointy-headed musos peacocking their chops, the musical equivalent of the gym rat perpetually showing off his sculpted guns by refusing to don any article of clothing with sleeves.

Animals as Leaders, though, are mindful of this stereotype and careful to avoid it, even though all three of them are absolute monsters on their respective instruments. Reyes has seldom been without a guitar in his hands since he was 6 years old (“I hardly remember not playing guitar,” he says). Fellow guitarist Tosin Abasi is a mostly self-taught prodigy who’s among the most adventurous, forward-thinking players of his day, while drummer Matt Garstka studied at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music.

The music they make together is rooted in harder-edged sounds, one of the reasons that Animals as Leaders have been able to tour with Meshuggah, Between the Buried and Me and the more death metal-centric “Summer Slaughter” tour, which they’ve been on twice.

But they’ve also hit the road with moody alt-metallers Deftones and post-punk troupes like Circa Survive and Thrice. If their tour-mates span genres, so do their tunes: jazz, pop and electronic music influences are all palpable in the band’s discography.

As such, Animals as Leaders are among the rare heavy bands that can go over with people who don’t normally like heavy bands — you know, like Mom and Dad.

“We often get people who tell us that their parents are huge fans, but they hate everything else that they listen to,” Reyes chuckles. “I think a lot of people have stopped listening to heavy music due to the intense vocals. I think it can turn off a lot of people, any type of singing, because it becomes a specific style, it becomes a genre. When you remove that, it allows the listener to start listening for technicality, for texture, all sorts of stuff that isn’t at the forefront when you listen to music with vocals.”

By helping reshape the concept of heaviness in contemporary music, Animals as Leaders have become a gateway act for the progressive instrumental scene, introducing it to a younger audience and helping greatly enhance its popularity.

The music itself isn’t new — it just sounds like it, in the hands of these dudes.

“Instrumental prog has been out for a while, but the pop element, which I think Animals brings to the genre, is what’s helping it kind of sound fresh again,” Reyes says of introducing the music to new ears. “We’re all about it.”

Read more from Jason Bracelin at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com and follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.