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Liquid Graveyard - On Evil Days review



Reviewer:
6.2

2 users:
7
Band: Liquid Graveyard
Album: On Evil Days
Release date: October 2009


01. Rumours Are Black Like Machine Guns
02. Criministers
03. On Evil days
04. Them Greeds
05. Their Words Grow Thin
06. From The Tower
07. 1760
08. The Blood Inside
09. We Live Dangerously
10. Anthead Grotesque

Innovation is generally a good thing. How many styles of music wouldn't exist today if not one band had started something hitherto unheard of? Some bands innovations however, don't manage much more than proving why certain mixes aren't attempted all that often. In this case I'm talking about Liquid Graveyard who gave death metal with black metallish growls and clean female singing a try.

The band consists of John Walker, known for his work in Cancer, whose wife Raquel behind the mic, Adrian De Buitléar (ex- Mourning Beloveth) on the bass guitar and Acaymo D behind the drum kit. Now it's a nice thing to have some familiar names in a band and it's also a nice thing to make some good groovy death metal with black-tinged growling, great riff-work and flexible drumming to accompany it. What's not all that nice though is "enhancing" the music with weak wannabe-soprano singing.

Let's face it, it wouldn't have fit the rest of the music if it were actually good vocal work. But to have a singer on board whose clean vocals would still suck in a third rate gothic or a female-fronted power metal outfit sounds like atotal fail to me. That's love I suppose. Semi-progressive elements and slower sections drag the music down even further.

To sum things up, the aggressive midtempo parts of the album are pretty good. The musicianship is solid, there are some great riffs and the music is all in all very nice to listen to. On the other hand the not-bad thrashy death metal is often disturbed by slow sections and penetrative clean female singing that's about as healthy for the album as living in a salt mine is for snails. A shame really because the album shows quite some potential whenever its disturbing factors are absent. So dear Mr. Walker; I sincerely hope that your wife will still let you at it after you asked her to please only use growls on your next release and a few faster passages wouldn't hurt either.

Some people will probably dig this as an original and different take on death metal. If the thought of (bad) soprano vocals doesn't sound all too enticing to you, you should rather stay away from this one though.


Rating breakdown
Performance: 7
Songwriting: 6
Originality: 8
Production: 7

Written by Bas | 16.11.2009




Comments

Comments: 2   Visited by: 50 users
17.11.2009 - 21:14
Valentin B
Iconoclast
When are you gonna write the review for the nebuleyes? is the soprano singing as bad as in that band?
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19.11.2009 - 12:18
Rating: 6
Bas
Retired Staff
Written by Valentin B on 17.11.2009 at 21:14

When are you gonna write the review for the nebuleyes? is the soprano singing as bad as in that band?

Well I'll have to listen to it more first and I wasn't able to do that yet (on an emotional level)
And no, of course not. This soprano singer just lacks talent, the nebuleyes singer makes me want to remove my eardrums with a sharpened shovel
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BAS - Beautifully Accented Sexiness
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