Review Summary: A Dark Halo is a band that brings to mind many memories. Memories of the time I drove a horse-drawn carriage with square wheels over a road made of glass that was also covered in screaming cockroaches.
Let me take you back to a time when industrial bands roamed the Earth; now, let me take you back to 2006 where absolutely nothing changed for A Dark Halo. Shamelessly borrowing overused sound effects from 90’s industrial bands, A Dark Halo slithered in with their debut album Catalyst. Boy did they get attention. The Nintendo GameCube video game, ‘WWE Day of Reckoning 2’, featured two of their songs with one of them (‘Burn It All’) being the game’s theme song. A Dark Halo had it all: the attention of two big names (Nintendo and WWE), they were featured in a video game, and anyone who bought the video game would know the band. What could cause a band, with such a promising start, to be virtually unknown in the music scene? Blame the band.
Although A Dark Halo claims to be unique - they are the exact opposite. Everything from the predictable guitar riffs to the mercilessly boring vocals say that this band is nothing special. For every good moment in the album, an equally worse one shatters it into oblivion. Synthesizers that could theoretically be used effectively are instead cheesy, excessive, and unforgivably annoying. Don’t like the synthesizers? No sweat. Dave Lowmiller’s vocals give the album what only a half-brained stooge would want: pathethic, boring, uninspired, emotionless vocals. Listening to ‘Indestructible’ for any extended period of time carries with it the sort of horror one could previously only experience by stepping into a shower and then realizing Cthulhu is already inside.
Everything that A Dark Halo does wrong is thanks to Lowmiller. Don’t like the typical cold atmosphere with typical strings (that many bands do) and horrible synthesizers? Blame Lowmiller. Tired of the kind of vocals that could initiate murderous impulses for the listener? Blame Lowmiller. The decision to keep Lowmiller was an idiot’s move, because the rest of the band does their job. The guitars are decent enough, the screams are decent (if not over-produced), and the drums are solid. If A Dark Halo replaced their singer, and their entire supposedly unique genre, something good might come from this atrocity. As it is, A Dark Halo is still the genre-abusing, forgettable band that no one listens to because no one cares.
