Review Summary: The 25th Hour who???
I don't expect a lot of you to know the 25th Hour are, but if your a fan of Scale the Summit you should stop right now and check them out, and don't read this review cause it is bad.
The 25th Hour is a technical/progressive instrumental trio, hailing from San Diego, CA. I discovered this band late last year, while trying to fine some new instrumental metal to listen to. I'm so glad I stumbled across this band and their debut album "Monsters".
The 25th Hour is like a Animals as Leaders/ Scale the Summit clone, with its 8 string guitar leads and groovy bass lines. The main focus off Monsters is it's guitar and bass playing. The guitarist and bassist from The 25th Hour Kyle Butts and Calvan Christ (respectively) really know how to play their extended range instruments, and do put on a show here. The playing at times is kind of crazy and all over the place as in their 1:25 album opener The Chosen One (which sounds an awfully like Behold...the Arctopus). It's when the playing slows down it gets really good, as on Elden where they give time to Calvan to play some hypnotizing bass grooves and show his magic. The next song Apparition (which is the slowest song from the record, but in my opinion is the best song here), the guitar and bass melody will have you humming or whistling them all day long. One of the best things about this album is that you can actually hear the bass, the best example are the two tracks i just talked about above Elden and Apparition (tracks 4 and 5). The last song off the album is called Attack of the Zombabies which is a 9:30 long epic. It has a nice little guitar lead at 1:12 and then at the mid point theres a chill section of the song going into some intense drumming followed by a pretty sweet guitar solo/fade.
Overall this album contains some cool little weird parts mixed throughout the album, a couple of niffty guitar solos, great sounding bass, breakdowns (which is the worse part on Monsters) and then the kick drum sounds triggered at times, but it doesn't really bother me. So anyway if your looking to find some new instrumental music "Monsters" will definitely not disappoint you, or to those of you who are just starting to get into instrumental progressive metal this will be a good choice for you and give you an idea on what type of music is out there.
