With Dead Hands Rising "The Horror Grows Near" CD
[Life Sentence]
I'm not sure how I feel about this. It's basically death metalcore. The vocals change off between lower growls and midrange screaming, the rhythms shift from ultra chunky mosh parts to tremolo picking, they throw around some note-based European flavored metal runs and staccato styled picking patterns, etc. It's okay. The songwriting's not great, but there are some sick riffs. The recording falls flat for me, though. It's too hollow. The vocals are too loud and sound separated from the music, there's no real bass presence, and the guitar tone has a weird sort of sheen to it that keeps the heavier rhythms from packing a full force assault. The drums sound pretty good to me, I just think they need to beef up the guitars and fill in the gaps that litter the mix. As far as their stylistic shifts, I definitely prefer the chunky power chords and start/stop sort of stuff. The metal riffs are alright but tend to not be as tight or fluidly performed as they'd need to be to work out. A nice clean break pops up in "Corey Feldman as the Devil" that's pretty sinister and different from the norm, showing that they do have some creativity working for 'em. The songs can also be too long, though. Four to five minutes or more isn't so bad, but these tracks don't feel like they go anywhere to me. I like the clean intro to "Early Winter Transmission" a lot because it takes its time and builds up very nicely with strong dual guitar interaction, and that basically continues once the distortion kicks in, but for an instrumental it need not continue for five minutes, and it definitely wears out its welcome a little after three three-minute mark. The layout looks cool and has a consistent color scheme and set of typefaces with some high contrast imagery over fiery clouds and whatnot. The lyrics are actually better than average as well, longer and less repetitive than most of this stuff, not to mention straying from the typical devices. "We've fallen apart with tragedy and malevolence but the dirt and violence has sunk under your nails consume your own eyes to the point where you can only see grey and the elegance becomes the obsolete..." I can't make up my mind about this one. I've gotta be hard on it just because there's really no one song that jumps out at me. Just bits and pieces. It's not totally unoriginal, but the derivative portions do bother me at times because the tremolo picking riffs are really weak. The mosh parts and melodic chords work much better with the vocal tradeoffs. I don't know, a better recording and tighter performance could make enough of a difference to throw me on the good side rather than remaining indifferent, but as a whole this isn't doing anything for me. (5/10)
Running time - 22:52, Tracks: 6
[Notable tracks: no complete song really hits me]
Life Sentence Records - http://www.lifesentencerecords.com

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