Amora Savant "The Immaculate Misconception" CD
[Volatile]
After a rather tactful noise intro with some samples indicative of what some of the content deals with here, the initial riffing style had me worried that this was gonna be another typical melodic Swedish death metalcore band, but even though there's a definite chunk of that style herein, these guys do wander away from those boundaries for the most part, which is definitely promising. The biggest setback they face here is a rather ineffective recording that doesn't totally destroy the force of their songs, but certainly hinders their potential significantly. The drums sound totally flimsy and unbalanced, the bass gets lost in the shuffle, and guitars and vocals are basically in a constant battle for dominance. Thankfully the guitars normally win out, but it sounds like they were going for something along the lines of the Sunlight sound, only with a lot less crunch, so they've got this weirdly dense, fuzzy guitar tone that's tolerable, but certainly not right for what they're doing. They need to give the drums more of a natural sense of density and crispness, get the bass tone a little more definition, and thicken up those guitars for a fluid, controlled crunchiness that would add force to their rhythms without suppressing the brightness needed to let the melodic accents have their impact. Despite a couple of your usual songwriting pitfalls (a few songs being a little too long for what they offer, occasionally jumping from riff to riff without smooth transitions, a few minor rough spots in the performances, etc.) these dudes are actually pretty slick songwriters though, shooting for a style most comparable to a less technical Misery Signals or something of that nature, and therefore contrasting light smatterings of rather basic chugga styled mosh with tons of melody, be it Swedish sounding runs or Shai Hulud-esque dual guitar layering with more character and dissonant energy, while the vocals shift from screams and growls to spoken passages. The vocals don't really do much for me, I actually think the spoken passages, while typical, possess a little more feeling than the growls or screams, which kind of seem forced against the intensity of the better elements of the music. I guess it's possible that a stronger recording could actually make the vocals sound more convincing too, though. There's not a terribly large degree of variety, but... that's alright for the most part. "A Picture Worth a Thousand Lies" opens with lots of quick shifts between lead melodies and stuttered rhythmic jaunts and catches my ear with some awesome dissonance; "Riding a Wave of Wishful Thinking" drops one quick little clean break towards the end where the drummer starts to color things up a little more (but sadly the flimsy drum sound makes it hard to really appreciate the kind of movement he's going for throughout the EP); and "Flames on the Horizon (A City in Ruins)" can be a little more straightforward in its use of discordant chord progressions and straight up burly, churning moshiness (still employing some sweet picking patterns that don't follow the standard road). The layout looks pretty good and uses metallic gold ink over black for lots of high contrast imagery and crisp text. The lyrics tend to be a little overdramatic in their overly fervent calls for taking control of your own life and living to the fullest throughout hardships and opposition, but I've certainly seen worse: "Be sure that I will not abandon these fond thoughts of a past once lived, but yet share a strong passion with the more modern and desolate. I will not disregard my past, but hold onto what I've come to know, as I try my best to accomplish the once thought impossible..." I don't know, I'll definitely say that I'd like to hear more from these kids. Despite minor shortcomings, each song has its moments, and I'd quite easily grant this a 7/10 were the recording not so damn scrawny. But there's a lot of strong content going on from a songwriting standpoint, and even though I've heard it all before, there aren't many bands out there who can pull it off, and these guys aren't so far off from that. Hopefully their next outing will be the one that solidifies their talent. (6/10)
Running time - 23:50, Tracks: 6
[Notable tracks: A Picture Worth a Thousand Lies, Riding a Wave of Wishful Thinking]
Amora Savant - http://www.amorasavant.com

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