BATTLEFIELDS - Thresholds of Imbalance 2009 (get it!!!)
Debut full length album from the Americans. Heavy metal and brutal vocals. Slow tempo and heavy distortion. This album is one out of a lot of garbage among the genre of modern metal. It can be the soundtrack of a rainy day and at the same time it can be the follower of a hot, sunny noon in a beach. It is a dirty myth or a heavy stone rolling down the slope and dive directly in the sea… Their doom is ambient and their ambient is sludgy. There is an unfamiliar rhythm and melodies which you can’t find it among heavy and doom metal releases. ‘Thresholds of Imbalance’ is an album that will surely satisfy many fans who are have trying to find all the shades of a fantastic release like this one in the next few listenings of them. Give time to the compositions. The tracks should concern all the underground doom metal fans who are searching for the perfect mix of hardcore, metal, doom and electronic ambient experimentation. There is a metalgaze smell around the atmosphere.Quite phenomenally, actually. Their success comes not only with superb execution, but also with a songwriting mentality that is fundamentally different than a great chunk of their peers. While many bands are concerned with thick, sludgy grooves and melodic atmosphere, Battlefields secured a leading spot by pushing their sound into a more desolate corner of the genre. The grooves and the ambience still make their appearances, but an impressively depressing feel and an austere visual aesthetic are the front-and-center elements that drive the record's excellence.
O.S.I. - Blood (2009)
OSI, a supergroup composed of a merry-go-round of players in the progressive rock/metal world but with a nucleus containing Kevin Moore (Dream Theater, Chroma Key) and Jim Matheos (Fate's Warning), will be releasing their 3rd album, Blood, in the United States on May 17th. We got a chance to preview this record, and have two reviews prepared - one from a longtime fan of OSI and the other from someone who has never heard of the band.A low, growling bass line and piercing guitar riff layer nicely over the album’s ubiquitous electronic effects and Gavin Harrison’s well thought out drum patterns. “You helped me to cut our losses.. cause dreaming isn’t living.. don’t come home”. Our character has obviously made a choice, I don’t know if it was just running away, or if it ended in death (maybe death and war are just metaphors here), but I’m going to keep listening to the album until I figure it out. Like the other albums in OSI’s catalog, “Blood” is fairly short (47 minutes and change), and it always leaves me wanting more.
Overall, I think Blood is the most complete album that OSI has made – I tried to find a common thread in all of the tracks linking them together, but I have no idea if I’m on the right track or not. I don’t really give a damn either, though, because the story of this nameless character that is running away from something and has an inner struggle which results in perhaps the wrong side winning is what I hear when I listen to this album. I think that “Terminal” and “Stockholm” could have been left off this CD in order to maintain a better flow between tracks – but as a fan of OSI, I’m going to keep listening and maybe I’ll find something I didn’t see before.
GET IT!!!
Mamiffer - Hirror Enniffer
Like an adamant darkening mist, Mamiffer’s Hirror Enniffer is a skulking presence that persists in its sense of despair only to evolve into distant calm right at the point when all hope appears lost.
Hirror Enniffer is Mamiffer’s debut and it breathes with all of the artistic sensibility one would expect from a musical visionary like Coloccia. Her sense of sound, her sense of feeling through sound, is exhibited in profound ways that intensify the experience with portions of classical, noise, and atmospheric rock.Hirror Enniffer comes like a dream, like an unrelenting vision that persists in deepening the tunnel until the bottom is all but forgotten. The tones are lush and somewhat damp, offering a glistening haze that carries through all six hypnotic tracks.
Mamiffer’s Hirror Enniffer is dream music. It is the soundtrack in one’s head that winds through scenes of open fields, through hands on blades of grass, through moonlit mysteries. It is also the last stop as the dream passes from glorious cheerfulness to disastrous nightmare. The eeriness is pitiless and the alluring tide of darkness is often interminable like an endless hall filled with locked red doors (“Suckling a Dead Litter”).
Music like this cannot merely be described; music like this must be felt.
Mamiffer’s debut is a beautiful piece of unremitting dream music, an arc of soft diaphanous emotion wrapped in pieces of classical music and brilliant noise. Hirror Enniffer is constructed out of the materials that engage our minds, fuel our dreams, and reveal our hopes.
GET IT!!!
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