Review Summary: A nice little EP from a nice little band.
Being relatively new to Sputnik I decided I should try to get my name out there by reviewing a very well-known album, or perhaps one on the main homepage. Unfortunately my computer has more problems than a mentally disturbed Voodoo priest. Therefore I decided to choose an EP by a band that I had been paying attention to quite a bit in recent months. If it isn’t obvious enough who they are I’d recommend getting your eyes examined. Of course the band I’m talking about is Monuments. Monuments is the spawn of ex-Fellsilent member John Browne and John Travis (The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza). If you’re unfamiliar with Fellsilent (the other band I will not talk about due to the fact I know nothing about them and I refuse to Google them), well then, I’d suggest going on Google and looking them up. However if you do so happen to know about them you will notice a few similarities between the two bands. The most notable one is the vocals. Neema Askari (vocalist) has quite the unique voice, if you consider sounding like an aggravated Paki rat is unique. That’s not to say that they don’t work for the music they play. In fact Askari’s clean vocals are pretty impressive.
Moving aside from the vocal work for now, let’s take a look at the actually songs themselves. The EP contains three tracks, each of which is much different from the last. The first track, Admit Defeat, opens with a very soothing a melodic-like piano. This goes on for about twenty seconds until it erupts into sweet Djenty goodness (no I will not discuss whether Djent is an actually genre of not or why there is a silent “D” in front of jent!) Yes, that’s right, I said Djent. But unlike most of their contemporaries Monuments seems to expand upon the Djent idea and add more dynamics to the slowly withering genre. Now that I’m down getting off topic lets continue. Admit Defeat is probably one of the highlight tracks of the EP, the other being Memoirs, and really shows that this band is going place that most others aren’t.
Now I know what you’re thinking. Oh here’s a little Djent fan boy praising this EP and he’s probably going to say that all the songs on it are amazing and unflawed beyond belief. As much as I would love to say that, I can’t. The second track is probably one of the most overly compressed pieces of music I have ever heard. That’s not to say the track is necessarily bad; that’s just saying it could be better. The compression of the drums really will turn most people off when it comes to repeatedly listening to the song (even for a demo the compression is lolz worthy). Neema’s vocals also are a major disappointment. He goes from sounding like a whiny schoolgirl to sounding like the crazy Hyena from The Lion King.
Thankfully Neema decided to cut his SikThy-esque impression for the last track, Memoirs. The wonderful dynamics being shared between the two vocalists (yes there are two) is pretty amazing. To top things off the clean vocals are probably some of the best I have heard in a while from a Djent band.
Overall Monuments has put out a decent EP. Sure it has its flaws, but what doesn’t. I would be looking forward to hearing more from this band if I wasn’t too busy fapping to the release of the new Deftones LP, but that’s how it goes. Anyways, I would recommend this to most people, but be warned, the vocals take time to grow on you and the production isn’t the best, otherwise this is a solid EP worth the free download.
