What the hell is this band's fucking problem? And why does anyone like this band? Not unlike their last EP, this material could be so fucking good, but it falls flat on its face for three reasons: 1. a weak recording, 2. shitty use of keyboards, and 3. a lot of minor performance flaws. The songs run from six to 14 minutes of slow, plodding doom with nice uses of bleak clean guitars (my favorite aspect, actually) and a mix of vocals that ranges from whispered to growled. The songs are a little bit long in some respects, but I don't even care, what I care about is the fact that the recording is completely weak. There's no punch, no density, no crunch to the distortion, nothing. It immediately falls flatter than a wet paper bag, and it damn sure never stands back up. And what's the deal with the sloppy performance? It almost sounds like the songs are partially improvised around a basic framework, because the instruments just sort of do their own thing a lot of times, playing basically in time with one another, but not necessarily working together. It's painfully boring as a whole. There are glimmers of excellence at times, but with keyboards dominating an already powerless mix... there's nothing here that grabs me all that much. I like the straightforward chord progressions and melodic lead lines when they fit together, and the clean passages tend to be awesome, but the songs are still unbelievably bland and boring... The layout is almost entirely black. It's all incredibly dark. The thick booklet is mostly jet black with some black on black images of high contrast faces and other faded images of the band members, and there are some images that look like faint smoke or flames across the cover. One of the songs is even titled after an image of a faint blue flame, which is pretty cool (a song title being expressed through an image rather than a word that is). The only other element is the lyrics, which are printed in clean dark gray text and fittingly enough seem quite bleak. "After a time in depths, There is a crack in the pressure, These shreds of light, Just a rope around my neck, These days of hope, A blade on my throat..." Not so bad. It's too bad the music is so tame. Re-record this record with a tighter performance, no keyboards, more volume, and more density and you'll have another beast on your hands, but this? I'll pass. It's a shame to hear so much potential go to waste like this...
[Red Stream]
Running time - 62:18, Tracks: 6
[Notable tracks: they all sort of put me to sleep most of the time]
Red Steam - http://www.redstream.org
