Including their 2009 debut, Italian Metal band Regardless Of Me have released 4 albums on 4 different labels, but I’m sorry to admit that this is the first one of theirs I have heard. I saw that they are Italian, Gothic Metal, with male and female vocals I immediately thought they would be similar to Lacuna Coil – well I was a bit off the mark there to be honest. Regardless Of Me don’t sound like Lacuna Coil, and they don’t sound particularly like anyone else that I’ve heard before either…which is a good place to start!
After the intro, the first thing that struck me is how rhythmically oriented the songs and in particular the production is. The kick-drums are so up front and overbearing that they seem to be almost bottoming out a little in the mix. I love in-yer-face drums, and ROM have a real drummer in their line-up, but the drum patterns are so littered with swirling cymbal samples and loops, that things just start to sound a little muddy, burying the guitars and vocals somewhat. This makes it more difficult to concentrate fully on the music, which sort of comes across as a very heavy Blood Flowerz or Asrai at times. Main-man ‘Mister Dark’ (who clearly must have a really embarrassing real name…!) handles the guitar, production, male vocals, keys and programming, so along with writing all the songs I presume this finished product is what he envisaged.
This album is certainly an almost unyielding onslaught of beats, with even the more mellow moments being crammed with extra percussion and samples giving no spare room for atmosphere to grow, but the point is that this is actually what makes the band more unique. The vocals are low in the mix but always delivered well. Also the melodies seem to gain a harsher, rawer edge from having to search harder than usual to hear them. This is clearly an album you need to work with, get into the bands vision and then see what starts to make sense. This will sound SO intense in a club, bouncing back from every surface, feeling the bass beats through the pit of your stomach as the high-end samples and keys cut through and utterly terrify the trad-goths mingling around the edges of the dance-floor.
It’s actually refreshing to hear a band or project with a vision which is not intent on being commercially lucrative or appealing to the masses, it’s just what it is, basically one man’s vision of what he would like to hear and I totally applaud ‘Mister Dark’ for that. I was quite glad it wasn’t another Lacuna Coil clone in the end, I’ve heard enough of those through the years, but even so, this album isn’t personally my thing, but that’s just personal taste and doesn’t mean I can’t recognise the merits and skill in the album. As an overall listening experience, if you have a hankering for the upper level of heavy intense dance-floor orientated goth metal, Regardless Of Me are certainly worth checking out.
(7/10 Andy Barker)
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