Review Summary: Vildhjarta release a little less skullcrushing album.
Vildhjarta do little, but enough, to distinguish themselves from every other fake and lame ass djent crap out there. Periphery and Tesseract. I'm talking about you guys. Vildhjarta might not need an introduction, but here's a short one anyway. Vildhjarta comes from Sweden, they started playing 2005 and they play djent, that's all you need to know.
Vildhjarta has always been slow cookers. Releasing their first album after 6 years and taking 2 years to write this EP that was originally scheduled to take 6 months. I bet Century is fed up with their "artistic integrity".
I'd say this EP is a step back from Masstaden due to the fact that this is more "in-your-face-djenty" in a bad kind of way. It's less atmospheric and it brings more of the chuggah-chuggah. Not to say the atmospheric parts are all gone, but they're not as prominent as on Masstaden. Take "Dimman", which is an instrumental track for example. Dimman is basically two parts, part one is a quite nice acoustic part which abruptly ends and in comes the heavy and just annexes the whole track. This doesn't flow well at all and the track feels like two tracks squeezed into one. There are some other parts of the EP that doesn't flow very well either. The transition between heavy and mellow seems forced and out of place many times.
The instrumentation is otherwise really top notch. The guitar playing and drums are tight and the bass surely brings the heavy. Ville's growls surely slays even if Daniel's highs still needs some improvement. Sometimes I also get the feeling that I'd like this band more if they cut back on some vocal parts and let the instruments do the talking. Because damn is this groovy from time to time. The ambient parts are dark and real tasty, even the cheesy piano in "Intermezzo" fits the overall theme of the EP very well.
Guitarist and songwriter Daniel said in an interview that he was influenced by all the evils in your everyday life while writing this. In that same interview he also said that he didn't want to force interpretations unto people and he wanted people to make their own interpretations. But there's how you should interpret this album. That's also why it's called Thousands of Evils.
