6

Great progressive metal... shame about the vocals

The music industry is a tough and unforgiving place. So why make life difficult for yourself? Imagine you were an up-and-coming metal band, starting to make a name for yourself on the live circuit. You have fantastic melodic sense, musicianship, timing, and an extremely well produced EP. And you decide what your sound really needs is some dodgy Orc-like screaming over the top.

Opener 'In This World' is a short but sweet introductory instrumental, creating a sense of depth and mystery. It evokes the terrible beauty of stormy seas, interstellar dust storms, or great ancient armies preparing for war. It also looks like it wasn't written by the band. Then it's shattered when over the top of the precision-engineered guitar work comes an entirely inappropriate, nay offensive, howl. 'Never Share a Foxhole with a Hero' is a failure for that reason alone. It drags it down to amateurish levels and actually takes away from the skill of the musicianship. If you have the technical ability of a band like Dragonforce, why drown it out with vocals that are, sadly, sub-standard.

What is even more galling is that for the chorus, and on 'Voids' and 'No Admiration for Failure' the singer proves that he actually has a fantastic natural voice as opposed to the forced-sounding guttural growls and screams. The ultimate triumph of style over substance is not when some faceless svengali controls bands into making such moves, it's when they do it to themselves.

'Voids' is a great track, barring the vocals. Highly original, slightly industrial but still maintaining a traditional doom-laden approach. Likewise, 'No Admiration for Failure' has some incredible melodic flourishes, and uses breaks in the music more effectively than previously without disrupting the flow. The twin-guitar approach is incredibly effective in taking the song to new stylistic areas. 'Chariot' is probably the most complete track on the EP. Using a toned-down version of the razorblade vocals combined with natural style and simple guitar and drum lines is probably the route for them if they couldn't bear to part with the vocal style but wanted to put out a single. But here their penchant for using pauses backfires, interrupting the beat of an intricate song.

'Lights of Omega' is disappointingly similar. For a band with a lot of tricks up their collective sleeves, they re-use the same things over and over. The songwriting and musicianship is excellent, and there's a lot of great groundwork here. But to crack the next level they will have to be brave, start experimenting, and not be afraid to break away from established ideas.