Painful hardcore
Hardcore band Awoken release their first 'full length' album. At least that's what it says here, personally I think calling a 27 minute album full length is stretching the definition somewhat. There are 12 songs on this album the longest of which is 3 minutes and 22 seconds. I know of bands with intro's longer than that. The shortest is 1 minute and 6 seconds, are Awoken assuming their fan base has no attention span to speak of whatsoever?
I played this without reading the sleeve and after a short while I glanced at the CD player to see how far along I was through the first song only to discover I was listening to the third song. This highlight two problems. One, that the songs are so short you don't get time to actually get into them and two, that the songs are so interchangeable you can't tell when you are listening to a different one. There is a split second gap between the tracks so a few times I thought it was a pause in the song before realising we'd moved onto a different one altogether, only constantly checking the CD player could I keep track of which song I was listening to.
So it goes on for the rest of this mercifully short album, all the songs sound exactly the same and if you put them on shuffle you wouldn't notice. The sound is muddy and incoherent with a 'singer' shouting over everything with a complete lack of inflection. Guys let me introduce you to my friend 'melody' no, not a Bond girl but a musical contrivance aimed at making music listenable
On a song writing front I hope Awoken didn't write anything too profound that may have brought about world peace because it is all wasted. The singer may as well be singing his shopping list for all you can tell. I sound like an old duffer banging on about how you can't hear the words in songs these days but the point here is that it's just a shouted row whereas something like death metal band Zyklon who lyrics you'd be hard pressed to understand either has a purpose to it's music with tempo changes and skill while still retaining their utter brutality.
On a positive note this album has aggression and anger by the bucket, it's just let down by not being able to put that across as anything more than shouting in your face.