Crisis Never Ends "The Human Encounter With Death and Desire" CD
[Burning Season]
Here's some decent metalcore from Germany with a pretty hefty 90's flare. There's a little bit of a modern influence, but the writing is really based more around chunky midpaced metal rhythms with the occasional melodic lead line or clean passage, or maybe even a slight death/thrash tinge in rare instances. They're really not a melodic Swedish styled band at all though, which is actually refreshing at this point, even if this is still unoriginal material. The vocals are aggressive yells that venture into growling/screaming territory here and there, but not too often. The songs that top four minutes can be a little bit bland at times due to the consistency of the midpaced tempos, but they're really good with the heavy palm-muting riffs and stuff, so... they do alright I guess. They sort of remind me of Unbroken gone modern, if that makes any sense. The songwriting is certainly not as emotional or powerful, though. I think the redundancy of everything is their biggest problem. The vocals are too loud, but aside from that the production is on the right track and needs only minimal work to pan out. Really I'd just give the guitars more crunch and remix it so that the bass and guitars play a larger role. I think that would pretty much do the trick. It's not thick enough, but it's pretty close... Though truth be told, the layout on this thing is absolutely atrocious. Everything is in black and white, which is fine, but the imagery is completely hideous. The cover image is sort of pixilated, the fonts are cheesy and hard to read, and inside, there are a bunch of weird manipulated band photos with choppy edges that look totally fucking stupid. I honestly have absolutely no clue what they were thinking there. Lyrically the topics are all personal, and then out of nowhere there's one song about scene unity, so everything's pretty standard: "Those memories come back to haunt me, They haunt me like a curse, Is a dream a lie if it doesn't come true, Or is it something worse?" The most important thing for these guys to do in the future is introduce more tempo changes into their songs. I'm not bothered so much by the lack of overall diversity, but the fact that almost every riff on the entire CD is the same speed gets very boring after about 15 minutes. (There's an unlisted track at the end of the disc that uses a lot more tempo changes and has a different vocal style, and I actually really like that approach.) After the first couple of songs I thought I would like this CD more than I did in the end, because by the time the disc was half over I was pretty sick of it. The female singing appearances and catchy elements of "November" definitely pick up the end of the record, but not enough to save it. This band has the ability to do much better than this, it's just a matter of whether or not they'll exercise that ability. (5/10)
Running time - 40:00 (approximately), Tracks: 9
[Notable tracks: November, the unlisted track]
Burning Season Records - http://www.burningseasonrecords.com

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