a saturation for such a small sector of that music market? Back to square one,
students (I can say that because I used to be a teacher) LOYALTY, and of
course, because… METAL. In the end, if someone is loyal, 99% of the time,
what a reviewer has to say is completely immaterial – it’s the reason
Metallica can get away with not having made a good album since last century
and still be considered the zenith. So, bearing in mind that the rest of this
won’t have any bearing whatsoever on what the people who are actually
reading this will think, here goes.
Darkness of an Age is the extended edition of Exist Immortal’s debut album
and if I could sum it up in one word, I’d say safe – or as safe as you can get
when it comes to growling metal. In music, there are always boxes to tick –
in classic rock, you expect 2 verses, 2 choruses, a middle 8, a guitar solo,
and an outro chorus. It’s formulaic, but it works; if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be
the formula. So, is there a formula to metal, then? More and more, we’ve
been seeing bands ebb back and forth between soft and heavy and I for one,
can’t really see the point of it in most songs, but that’s just me – some people
are into that. The Void is a perfect example of that. Does it make sense in the
song to stop growling or to include that breakdown around the two minute
mark? All I can say for sure is that it requires a very strong melodic vocal to
pull it off without sounding generic. Some people will think that Meyrick De
La Fuente does have such a voice, others won’t.
EDM, as anyone who doesn’t really listen to EDM calls it, is popular right
now. It’s bled into everything, and unfortunately so, in my opinion. It’s
homogenised music in a way that hasn’t been seen since synth got big in the
80s, and we all know how that turned out. Dub, or pale immitations of
dubstep have been popping up everywhere from Katy Perry to Madonna.
Granted, Nine Inch Nails brought electronic music into the alternative/metal
scene over 25 years ago, but it