Xerath-II

Candlelight Records
2011

I sat and stared at a blank computer screen for well over 15 minutes trying to come up with an opening for this review. This is the best I can up with so if your still reading this then there will be an extra cookie for you at the end. Hailing from London, England the band Xerath formed as "an experiment to combine film score composition with extreme groove based heavy metal" (per their bio). Alright class what have we learned about experiments from watching "Sci-Fi" B- Movies from the fifties and sixties? Yes, you in the back row with the Napalm Death shirt on. Yes, your exactly right when you say it usually ends with some bad rubber and cardboard abomination wrecking havoc on a bunch of bikini wearing beach babes. The result is normally a mind scratching attempt to figure out how you could have gotten it so wrong. Now I don't want to make it sound as if I don't care at all for orchestral/progressive metal. And I certainly have nothing against groove metal (or groove metalcore which is a better way to describe the band aspect of this little project). Heck even the film score part sounds interesting on paper. But as I went to listen to the opening song "Unite To Defy" I had to look around to make sure I didn't have another window open on my computer or that the TV wasn't left on by my kids again. It's not so much combing these different elements for the group. It sounded as if two different (as in two separate different sounding) songs were playing at the same time. It wasn't until about the 4 minute mark that the two songs finally separated ever so briefly before everything crashed into each other again,separated,etc. "God of the Frontlines" was a tad better as there were times when everything synced up perfectly. When it does you can see where they are going with this. Problem is that far too often it just sounds like someone just layered this beautiful film score over some random Pantera/metalcore (insert metalcore band of your choosing here) band without much thought as to if it would work out not. This is another one of those occasions when I also have to wonder what the British are smoking when their music rags are heaping crap loads of praise on them. I just don't get it. If they enjoy sitting in a small room and listening to The Cleveland Orchestra conduct a film score while at the same time some metalcore band plays whatever comes to mind for almost sixty minutes then that's all them. I'm just glad that some of us got out while the going was good because if this is the sort of thing that makes them giddy like schoolchildren then God save the Queen indeed!