Album Review: Session 606 - Rebirth

About a month ago Session 606 released their (or rather, his, but more on that later) debut studio EP, Rebirth.  From what I've been told, Rebirth is the first half of what was initially going to be Session 606's debut album, although due to recording costs and whatnot (damn you, economy!) the album was split into two parts with the second EP, Hiatus, coming out in the near future. The EP is only available on bandcamp, with profits going directly into the recording sessions for the Hiatus EP.

So just what is Session 606? Session 606 is the project of Anthony Masington. I'm hesitant to say that it's definitively a "solo project", but Masington is the brains and brawn of Session 606 having composed all the music and having recorded a majority of the music as well (everything except for the drums and percussion on this EP was performed by him). And what does this kind-of-solo-project-but-not-really sound like? A little proggy, but at the same time a little electronic. The Session 606 bandcamp page is tagged as "electro-prog", "electrocore", and "progtronica"- this isn't exactly my genre of expertise but after listening to Rebirth several times I feel confident in saying that those are accurate tags. I don't listen to a whole lot of new prog, but Masington's vocals fit in nicely with bands such as 3 and Coheed and Cambria. His voice is calm but chilling at the same time, helping give a haunting effect to the music. Sometimes the vocals remind me a bit of Anthony Green as well, but again this isn't the stuff I usually listen to so I might be alone in hearing that.

It should be noted that before starting Session 606, Masington was the frontman for The Flatline Symphony (another new prog group that may or may not have been unfairly lumped in with the post-hardcore crowd), as well as a member of Mours (rock project helmed by Coheed and Cambria drummer, Josh Eppard) and the live guitarist for Weerd Science (Josh Eppard's hip hop alter ego). So if the "electro-prog" and "electro-core" tags didn't already intrigue you, hopefully now you're interested.

As I mentioned earlier, Rebirth is available only on bandcamp. There might be a physical edition sometime in the future (released in full alongside Hiatus), but I suggest that you to get into it now. You'll get six great tunes, the gratification of knowing that you'll be directly helping toward the release of the next batch of songs, and you'll have the personal satisfaction that you discovered Session 606 well before that poser in your math class (who thinks that "Ramones" is a brand name) said that Session 606 was their favorite band.

For your convenience, I've embedded the Rebirth player below, but if you'd rather check out the Session 606 Bandcamp page by all means go and do that. From there, you'll also be able to check out the Anorexica EP (it's available for a free download), so maybe you should just go do that.

http://session606.bandcamp.com/