Crowpath "Red on Chrome" CD
[Willowtip]
Here's the long awaited full-length from these Swedish masters of all things chaotic, discordant, technical, and in your fucking face - clocking in at right around 30 minutes with a slew of relatively short and frantic tracks. Expect tons of blasting beats and fills that sound almost inhumanly busy and frenetic, scathing midrange vocals that sort of vary from shouting to screaming, and jarring guitar/bass interplay that roams all over the place from grinding tremolo picking or caustic upper-neck chords to more concrete rhythmic chunks and fucked up, twisted time signatures (but not in an overt math rock sort of manner at all). Now, admittedly there are moments here that aren't doing it for me, but it's a two-way street. "XIII" is a pretty irritating track that gets a little too abrasive and noisy for me to tolerate, but the title track, by contrast, is far slower and more discordant, bordering on obscure doom influences in a sense... very fucking nice. "Clean" is another slower piece, building up carefully from just percussion to a thick, throbbing wall of sound that has a more gritty and intense tone than most of the songs - caving into garbled vocals and sizzling feedback/harsh noise in the final minute or so. The recording is powerful but a little strange in some ways. Certain elements come off as somehow oddly compressed, the mix is a little hard to wrap your head around as far as being a little busy, and the drums are just bizarre in some ways. On the one hand they kind of sound sort of rigid and machinated, but at the same time there's a dry sort of natural snap to some of the hits - making it sound complexly layered, almost as if there's a kit and some additional percussion at work. Very unusual. The bass tends to get lost, and I think the overall mix needs more clarity, but for the most part this still sounds better than most bands of this nature. Visually everything looks nice and clean, with tight text, nice textures, a consistent color scheme, etc. The band's emblem of crossed brass knuckle handled knives is printed on the cover in a light gloss overlay, adding to the overall effect. The lyrics seem to be personal but are abstract enough to be curious. "This wearing embrace is like having needles buried deep in the soul, disturbing every breath, every thought, everyl move. Calling in sick again, finding peace in the bottle again. Hell bound..." Overall I could draw songwriting and stylistic parallels here to both the more respectable and tightly wound side of metalcore as well as the more over the top and flurried side of death metal via more recent excursions by Cryptopsy and the like, which is a middleground for me. On the one hand portions kick ass and I highly admire the band's musicianship, on the other hand the general pulse of the disc can be a little one-sided and lacking in tangibility for even 30 minutes straight to be wholly effective. I fucking love tracks like "Red on Chrome" and "Clean", but I'd like to hear those influences blended in against the sheer speed and aggression making up the core of the record as well (as they are with "Like Flies to Flames" in large part). Definitely good, but there's a little need for breathing room to make this truly incendiary. (7/10)
Running time - 29:54, Tracks: 13
[Notable tracks: Like Flies to Flames, Red on Chrome, The Precise Art of Knives, Clean]
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