Review Summary: A highly creative debut, that is rocking, depressing, and weird all at the same time. For metal fans that tend to like their metal a little left of center.
I’m sure everyone on Sputnik knows there is a lot of ‘white noise’ out there. Every guy (or gal) that can afford a computer, a microphone, and some recording software is putting out an album. For even the biggest music freaks (like me) digging up buried treasures is getting harder and harder to do. There are so many artists, so many webpages, and only so much mediocre stuff, which would have never seen the light of day just 15 years ago, that one can take. All of that to say, here is something that my fellow hard rock and metal lovers just might enjoy discovering.
Not much info on this guy is floating around, save what is found on the bandcamp page. The album is described as a break-up album and I think that might not be the best description. It does have the sad, sappy stuff, and then again, it has balls, like an all-out assault on his ex-significant other, with lyrics pissed off enough to conjure up some pretty dark mental imagery. As far as the theme, with song titles like ‘BackSeat Girl’ and ‘Queen for a Day’ it doesn’t take much imagination to know where those songs are going.
As far as the music goes, that is what really turned me onto this album. It seems impossible to pinpoint a specific style. It really reminds me of Faith No More, in the fact, it can heavy as hell, then can get weird, then really melodic, and one song can contain 5 different styles of music. It is definitely cohesive as a whole, but you’ve definitely go a lot going on. Take the opening track ‘BackSeat Girl’, it opens with a slow groove and some resounding notes, before tearing into the verse with a punchy down-tuned metal riff and you get to a bridge that erupts into a dreamy post-rock haze complete an electric piano as the solo. Much of this album follows suit, a mix of bombastic metal, dreamy (almost shoegaze) riffs, and left turns you don’t hear coming.
Another thing that really stands out, is the prominent use of keyboards, but they are used in such a way, that most of the time it is subtle, filling out the music, much like older FNM. There are some definite stand-outs for me, such as the title track, with a hypnotic keyboard carrying the verse, before breaking into a hard-hitting chorus. The track ‘Visions’, with almost sludge-metal sounding verse and erupting into hardcore style chorus, and then ending with a strange as **** double-bass pounding outro with Donovan singing over the top with dreamy ‘la la la’s’. ‘Queen for a Day’ is another bizzare track, with starts out with an eerie spoken word verse, going into a fairly standard metal chorus, and then you get to the bridge that breaks out into straight death metal. It’s those off-the-wall changes within each song, that really keep the album interesting, despite a fairly lengthy 16 track set.
He pretty much covered his bases, with almost every style of metal imaginable popping up at some point in the music. The guitar work is pretty killer, with a lot of harmonic parts, a la, Iron Maiden showing up. The only reason I didn’t rate this higher is his voice. The production is great, the music is solid, but the singing is going to be the ‘make or break’ for most listeners. He has a fairly limited range, but he definitely makes it work within the context of the songs. There is some dark spoken word sounding stuff, some gruff, 90’s sounding singing going on, but I feel what he does best, is the dreamy, Deftones sounding style, which pops up in songs like ‘Conclusion’ and ‘Get Out Alive’. I think for fans of hard rock, there is something there for everyone, which is a good thing and a bad thing. No 2 songs sound exactly the same, so if you are only digging one aspect of the music or the singing, you may only find a few songs that you dig. However, the album definitely feels cohesive, in the overall ambience, dark, heavy, depressing, and if that’s your thing, I high recommend you check it out.
Here is the link where you can find it.
http://donovancox.bandcamp.com/releases
