Review Summary: In Relentless, AVIIRA is all over the place and never manages to hit the mark. While some sections may be enjoyable, this EP overall will most likely leave you disappointed.
Tyranny starts off the album on a high note (relative to the rest at least). I think both the screams and cleans are well executed, and the riffs are pretty sweet. The problem is that it just doesn't excel anywhere. It has a couple strong(er) points but the structure makes it feel like there is no climax and so it just kind of ends. I was going to mention the vocal edit at 39 seconds but that's the only instance of it in the song so it gets a pass. Overall decent but it's not strong enough to be more than filler.
Desolate starts off promising, as did Tyranny. The intro is completely uncharacteristic of the rest of what the band has put out and is interesting in its own right, but at 40 seconds there's this marimba bit thrown in that adds nothing except for confusion. The chorus that follows is catchy, but it's quickly overshadowed by a slew of edits that are nothing more than cheap tricks in order to create some sense of tension. At 2:25 there's this build up which is actually pretty sick minus the edit, but it fails to resolve itself in any way that is equivalent to the level that they've built it up. In addition, they should have just ended the song at 4:10. The outro is just abysmal.
Glasshouse's intro is a stain on the genre of metalcore. Maybe EDM edits will sound good one day, but today could not be further from then. They should have just cut everything up to the first chorus. The rest of the song isn't even that bad, but it's not enough to pull itself out of the hole that it dug itself into.
Carpe Vitae, in my opinion, should be what AVIIRA uses as a template for their future work. It's inoffensive and is structured in a way that maintains your attention throughout. Not my cup of tea but not bad.
As heavy as Relentless tries to be, it lost my attention more quickly than any of the others. The cleans don't sound as good as in the others, and the rest is just a blur. The worst part though about this is that the chorus sounds like an exact copy of the Tyranny chorus. In a world plagued by thousands of carbon-copy metalcore bands, duplicating part of your own songs is a mortal sin (ESPECIALLY ON A 5 SONG EP).
