Atmospheric metal from Holland with female lead vocals and an orchestral/gothic sort of style. I thought their last EP was okay, but not great, and ironically I like this less because the recording is worse. The guitar tone is awful. It's got a really harsh bite to it that sounds like it was recorded direct, so it's not that heavy at all, leaving the guitars sounding totally unnatural and out of place. The drums are a little rigid, but tolerably so, and everything else sounds pretty dense and natural. I think the bass and keyboards sound pretty good, as do the vocals. The female singing is damn good, her range is strong and she really goes all out and hits the notes very emphatically, totally putting her all into it. The male vocals take a backup role and follow more aggressive lines - growls, screams, etc. The songs are pretty boring, however. Things generally follow midpaced lines and hit on some typical progressive metal types of chord progressions and structures, not too technical or anything, and the synths play a pretty major role. Think staccato chords with open space in between that lets keyboards fill the gaps, a few faster picking patterns, softer breaks, and so forth. "Beautiful in Emptiness" opens with some gorgeous acoustic guitars, if only the distortion sounded so perfect... but, alas, the song is still not that good despite some nice introductory riffing. "Two Sides" picks up the pace at first but quickly reverts to significantly slower riffing that's more stripped down and spacious, still making for a generally good piece, but it's the only song that stands out to me. Another issue I have is that the songs are too long. There's no need for this record to run an hour, and with five- to seven-minute songs on average things sort of run in circles and lack force. The layout is fucking terrible on this thing, ruining it from the start if you ask me. The entire concept is based around photos of cityscapes obscured by digitized textures and circles, all in shades of blue, with a few mediocre photographs of a little girl that tie in to the theme of the disc. But it gets worse, because the lyrics, while not so bad, are still dealing with the story of troubled childhood and hardships and whatnot, with each page of lyrics showing a page in the aforementioned little girl's diary, which is absurdly cheesy, and one of the most boring concepts I've ever heard of for a metal CD. The first page of the diary actually has a sentence that reads, "My parents are the worst! I hate them so much...", so that pretty much destroyed my interest in what the rest of the content deals with. There's also a goofy band photo where they're all wearing matching outfits of some sort of tight-fitting black and blue leather/spandex shit or whatever. Cheesy. The music isn't cheesy to me, just uninteresting. A shame. The singing is strong and deserves better music to work with. A stronger guitar tone would definitely have made a difference, but these songs really lack energy, so it wouldn't have saved the record. Oh well.
[Transmission/The End]
Running time - 59:00, Tracks: 12
[Notable tracks: Two Sides]
The End Records - http://www.theendrecords.com
