Melodic and heavy.
British five piece The Eyes of a Traitor’s debut album is a solid, pleasingly complex record. They manage to combine slices of metal from every conceivable sub-genre heading you can think of giving them a universal appeal; heavy, heavy, heavy combines with groove and melody, complex riffs sit alongside moments of sweeping majesty, it’s an extremely well rounded and mature sounding debut. When you can slide easily from ‘Decorus’ which has many layers of gentle piano echoes, emotional vocals and complex time signatures straight into the heavy immediacy of ‘Misconceptions’ which thrashes out a whole range of barmy riffs and layered vocals, you have a really satisfying experience which begs for repeated listens.
It must be said that Eyes of a Traitor are not, despite their musical maturity and extremely listenable quality, producing tunes that are wholly original, but this is really a moot point because that’s such a hard thing to achieve in a saturated metal market and the record is just so good it ceases to matter five seconds into the first track. What they are doing though is turning out an album that is packed with quality, easy to digest tracks that are also angry, nasty and very heavy.
The tunes, even on the most familiar sounding tracks, are offset with great melodies and often some really decent soloing, ‘Like Clockwork’ is a prime example, quite standard chugs are given a lift with complex rhythms and a distorted down beat ending. Likewise the showy riffage at the start of ‘With Different Eyes’ gives way to a really nasty combination of emotional vocals, intense drums and moody guitar that brings goosebumps to your arms. The record is just one killer track after another from opener ‘Under Siege’ which has an almost 90s nu-metal twang twisted to fit the times, to the gang vocals and Trivium-esque riffs of the uplifting ‘Echoes’ they show their influences but always put their own spin on everything; there is so much to get your teeth into that this is easily a contender for album of the year.