Album Review: Skyharbor – Blinding White Noise: Illusion & Chaos

For a landmass as vast as India, a country with over 1 billion people living in it, the number of times you come across one of their metal bands isn’t all that often but there is now a rapidly-growing scene. The furore surrounding New Delhi’s Skyharbor is indication that the world stage is primed and ready for the floodgates to open. Why Skyharbor have been one of their breakthrough acts isn’t clear, but their global sound and the fact they have sunk their teeth into such a vogue genre must be factors.

Nailing a worldwide release for their double-disc debut album, Blinding White Noise: Illusion & Chaos, can’t have been the smoothest of rides (“four years of epiphanies and disappointments” according to brainchild/guitarist Keshav Dar) but it’s easy to see how they got there in the end when you see which label they are gracing (Basick) or cast your eyes down the number of international guest appearances. Also bear in mind that these contributions are from guys who offered their help, not vice-versa. Guys like ex-TesseracT vocalist Dan Tompkins, whose pin-point tone is so obviously the key to the Skyharbor door-lock and consequently ends up singing on 80% of the album, and guys like ex-Megadeth axeman Marty Friedman who contributes to two tracks.

The majority of the content is made up by the Illusion disc and, honestly, it’s a delight to finally hear a modern progressive metal record that is happy to dip its toes in the waters of djent, but doesn’t feel the need to obstruct the flow of the songs with incessant levels of palm-muted hammering or flood you with wave upon wave of ambient wash. The band has allowed for a very organic writing process. Left unencumbered by heavy-handedness or complex mathematics the natural rhythms are left to flow and create instantly recognisable patterns. The production has followed suit and swapped hard, angular tones for a softened, more emotive backline that has put the vocal upfront and undominated. “Dots” is a straight-up joy, “Catharsis” is a brilliantly-layered puzzle with an undemanding solution, and “Celestial” burns with unambiguous, anthemic ambition (listen out for Friedman’s blistered, falling riff and Amogh Symphony’s Vishal J. Singh’s quixotic solo).

Any pent up anger that comes from holding back their instincts is released within the howling confines of Chaos. The band rip into the music with vigour, winding up the pace of their attack and rolling around in distortion and syncopation like pigs in muck. Sunneith Ravankar (Bhayanak Maut) is let loose to roar almost continuously through “Trayus” and “Aphasia”, but it is the split-personalities of “Insurrection” which invigorate the most as, like a spinning compass, the befuddling rhythm finally settles on a direction, both in its more turbulent and calmer guises. Throughout Chaos you get the sense that the heart of the album is still there, latent in the background, desperately fighting to burst through the surface as and when it can. And yet I am left with mixed-feelings about this segue into crushing heaviness. There are several bands who have mastered this kind of polyrhythmic, invasive bedlam already, so whilst it provides a deathly foil for the life-giving properties of it’s sister disc, to some extent it feels a little like the band are laying out their abilities to merely impress; an over-exaggerated evil, perhaps?

Illusion is far more beguiling and there is one particular work of art that sums up everything that is brilliant about Blinding White Noise. With intertwined rough and smooth layering pouring like colors out of “Maeva”, it’s a composition that, whilst forming just one more mountain top in a rolling range of peaks, is a piece of music that seems to transcend faceless labels. You simply couldn’t get away with calling it a “track” or a “song” without doing it an injustice, so I haven’t. At its core lies a series of spine-tingling change-ups that provide the platform for Tompkins to soak us in gloriously sweet emotion. His magnificent tone and eloquent words seem such a fitting place to end this review, so I’ll hand you over to him… “It’s so damn hard to let go / But take a chance / And survive, come together, embrace life / This is India!”

Also online @ The NewReview

Album Review: Megadeth - Th1rt3en

The toys have been thrown out of the pram, Ellefson has emptied his pockets, Mustaine has found God and now they’re back together, playing and recording music, and all is well in the world. Not only this, but the band are producing show-stopping performances once again, joyously bringing out more of their classic material for headline tours and rising to meet the challenge of playing their part on the Big Four circuit. A perfect time to be heading back into the studio you would think. Then, under pressure to deliver, they go and write an album called Th1rt3en (unlucky for some) and commission cover art that sees mascot Vic Rattlehead showing his back to you. Throw in all the furore kicked up by Mustaine’s gleeful comments about getting out of the band’s Roadrunner contract and the rumor mill is back up and churning away nicely.

I’ve always sworn blind that Megadeth’s peak was in the early 90s, so I was delighted to find that Th1rt3en recreates the same patterns that inhabit the albums from that era. For a start, Th1rt3en is less frenzied than Endgame. It’s hardly laid back, but it’s certainly less of a speed-fest and prefers to thrash out over a mid-paced rhythm, all the while tossing in strong flavors of power metal and rock n’ roll as it travels. The songs have tighter, catchier riffs that all point us directly towards each chorus, where Mustaine picks up the baton and runs in circles repeating the song-title until it lodges itself, irretrievably, in our brains.

Two songs in and I’m recalling parts of Rust In Peace‘s “Hangar 18″ in the key changes, the sharp tongue of Countdown To Extinction‘s “Architecture Of Aggression” and Youthanasia‘s “Reckoning Day” with its ripped chords. The build into the chaotic and brilliantly complex “Sudden Death” is classic, a spiralling solo and a thrilling, skidding riff that pans around your head. Following, “Public Enemy No. 1″ is all bluster and purpose with Mustaine intent on tattooing the four title words to your forehead. All this promise and yet, after a good few run-throughs, it all begins to sound a bit lacklustre. “Whose Life (Is It Anyways?)” turns out to be a limp-wristed shadow that falls apart when it drops the pounded beat (no word of a lie, it reminds me of David Lee Roth’s solo material), “Guns, Drugs & Money” wallows so long in its own filth that it simply forgets to evolve, and the mind-numbingly repetitious “Wrecker” manages to sound more Mötley Crüe than Megadeth.

There’s just so very little bite or sense of foreboding in a lot of this happy-go-lucky rock music they’ve created. Megadeth’s unbeatable sense of pervasive gloom and urgency of delivery is what defines them but save for a handful of tracks, it’s just not present. Their precious dark minor chords are suddenly thin on the ground and, “Millennium Of The Blind” excluded, even the fire of Mustaine’s famed political angst seems to have been extinguished. Who ever thought we’d hear Megadeth dishing out lyrics about life in the “Fast Lane” to a rock n roll backdrop, or hear them goading us with pop swill like “Black Swan”. Mustaine repeatedly offers up the most cumbersome of lyrics – “The soil is red now that you’re dead” from “Deadly Nightshade” or “Like a severed arm washed up on the shore, I just don’t think I can give anymore” from the title-track, and don’t get me started on the rhyming words that are shoehorned in during the chorus of “Public Enemy No. 1″. Johnny K, producer and major contributor, I’m looking at you.

Unfortunately, amidst the carnage caused by so much weak material dragging the album down, superb tracks like “Never Dead”, “New World Order”, “Millennium Of The Blind” and “13″ might just get missed. The former couple are driving, lurching, spitting demons with solos to absolutely die for, whilst the latter duo are heartfelt, colourful anthems. Amongst all the hubbub and flim-flam surrounding the band reaching the landmark of a 13th album, let these tracks not be overlooked. At the end of the day though, it does seem, rather than concentrate solely on delivering an album full of decent music, Megadeth, in some vain attempt to get their tracklisting up to the magic number 13, have gone and produced more filler than killer.

Also online (with samples) @ The NewReview = http://thenewreview.net/reviews/megadeth-th1rt3en