Not sure if I have covered this before in my weekly scribblings that are under a thinly veiled attempt at an album review, very much an excuse to air some dirty laundry and try and be as clever as I can in seven hundred words or so but when asked what music I enjoy, the stock response is metal. Now, as we all know, ‘Metal’ is an extremely broad church (sorry Black Metal fans – burnt church) and encompasses many a flavour or varied stench, going from Thrash, NWOBHM, BM, Goregrind through to Hair Metal and so on. Its this myriad of musical styles that keep this genre we all love and hold dear to our hearts, engaging, enlivening enlightening, entertaining and sometimes engorging (easy now).
Per example, this morning I dined out on a musical feast of the Communards, followed by some Isis (the band), segueing into The Mission before finishing off with some staccato snare drum love, courtesy of Snapcase. Now this isn’t me building an altar to myself, to which you all must come and genuflect in my general direction for being so open to all forms of music, no, it simply points to a point I am slowly building towards. Music, in most of it’s forms, is the most wonderful of things and its ability to provoke feelings of love, warmth, happiness, sadness, guilt and anger and the whole gambit of human emotions somewhere in between, is a marvel in itself. But there are some exceptions to this and unfortunately, you do come across music by bands you know and love (as well as some that you’ve never heard of), that stink up the room like an attic at the height of summer full of excrement filled nappies covered with the contents of Jack the Ripper’s bowel bin. As a reviewer, it’s often as easy to eviscerate, as it is to praise, effusive praise and damming prose are the meat and potatoes to any writer, but where it becomes slightly more problematic and taxing, are those albums that fall somewhere in between.
Finnish, post metal/modern metal crew Atlases are a case in point, on this their second album. This isn’t a bad album by any stretch of the imagination, indeed it isn’t a half bad at all. It has huge towers of guitars that shroud and encompass your cerebral cortex whilst delicate solo’s swirl, drift, and glide in and out against the backdrop of alternate clean and slightly growled vocals, punctuating the ethereal soundscape. It takes it’s time to get where it’s going, before the heavy interludes crash through the door, like a forty six year old father of two, fresh from a bender of the local pubs of Reading, ten pints in and having only eaten half a packer of Frazzles all day. It is effective in its construct as well as it’s playing and production. It’s decent, inoffensive and at times engaging….BUT it’s just, well I’ve heard this album before, by better bands. It’s certainly sounds derivative to my ears, pillaging from the good and the great of this specific genre including musical touchpoints such as Red Sparowes, The Ocean, Pelican and a myriad of others that have blazed this trail long before Atlases decided to take their first tentative steps.
Taking influence from other bands is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact this is how musical genres, themes and styles, grow, change, and develop over time. Unfortunately for Atlases, ‘Woe Portrait’, although a competent and at times engaging collection of songs, just does not do enough to stand out from the crowd and develop beyond the sum parts of its influences. As such, it comes across as merely competent and proficient, which is OK I guess, but in today’s world where a million and one songs are available to you in a split second, I would wager, that if you happened upon Atlases on your daily musical listening odyssey, it would certainly pass five minutes of your time but it wouldn’t necessarily resonate much beyond that point.
(6/10 Nick Griffiths)
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