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Amendfoil: Skyline escape
14/11/13 || Ironpants
Sometimes when I try to “plan” my music consumption, there is a glitch in the matrix, or a disturbance in the force. As a highly overpaid GD reviewer, I try to at least stick to a small plan. If I have a queue of stuff to be investigated, I use the transport time in my car to “listen in” to an album. I have a 30 minute drive to work, so there’s an hour each day I can use to filter out if it’s going to be a review or a stub (or sometimes nothing). When that is decided, it gets promoted to my in-house sound system for further investigation. As I listen to music pretty much 24/7, there’s always time for “work” or “pleasure” depending on what my goal is with my listening habits. Now and again, there is an album that fucks everything up, and Amendfoil’s new album is one of those. I’ve had it for a while, and I can’t really put my finger on what they have accomplished? I can’t say it has changed my world, but it has crawled under my skin. Why? I’ll try to explain, but it will be hard.
Amendfoil is from Finland, and I have said it many times before, those rascals over in the land of thousand lakes is squirting out bands like there’s no tomorrow. There is almost always very high quality on the recordings, even if the genre isn’t always up my alley. But these gentlemen in Amendfoil refuse to be clear about what the hell they are doing. I can’t without difficulty say what genre they represent, more than that it’s fucken good shit. If you look the band up on Metal Archives, the description is death/thrash, and that’s not even close, I would call it “modern catchy metal with a twist” so I can save up on 45 genres I would have to type down for the sake of describing it. They may have been some kind of thrash/death outfit in their early days, and they have some kind of raw power beneath their well played music, but that’s all I can say here?
The first track ‘Blackleg’ opens up and in the first 30 seconds you think you got it nailed, “Ahhh, OK, groove metal”, but then the song changes character to some half tech metal with a really cool riff that is more complicated than it sounds at first, and in the chorus it changes once again to some melodic metal and the singer alternates his voice between semi-harsh and a cheesy sounding Robbie Williams (?!) voice in the chorus. I’m confused, but in a good way. I can’t, and will not, go through all the songs on the album, because that would be impossible to do, and boring as hell to read.
What I can say though is that all the songs contain a vast amount of genre blending, but still coherent and never out of line. They change easily between technical, groove, melodic, weird and hard metal. It’s very interesting to listen through the album like a journey and just sit back and enjoy the ride. Honorable mentions are the songs “Stella nova” and “Knives” where they excel in both catchiness and outermost “tech-chaos”.
I mentioned the singing, and Lasse Mäki has a voice that is like a chameleon, and he changes his voice to suit the different styles, I don’t really know if he is the best singer around and there are parts where you hear a rather fat Finnish accent, but somehow it fits perfectly and he is a very big part of the sound. Especially in some of the choruses where they use overdubs in the same way as Devin Townsend does, or Queen and even Sweet did in the good old days. At times he also sounds a bit like Geoff Tate when he was good. Very diverse singing style, I’m impressed.
The rest of the band are of very high class, and the guitar section use unconventional, yet very catchy riffs that are interesting and unexpected without being over-technical for the sake of it. The drummer is a man of action, and have all parts of the kit working all the time. The bass is a bit pushed back, but you hear him working his poor four strings here and there. Together they put up a very good layout through the whole album, and it is a pretty fat sound all in all.
I am not going to mumble on too much this time, more than highly recommend this album to those who like interesting and diverse music that maybe isn’t the hardest shit around (but still very much in the spectrum of metal). This band is going to be real interesting to follow and see how they develop their style, they are pretty unique as it is, and I hope they don’t fall in some trap of trying to please one particular genre. Don’t get me wrong, they are melodic as hell, but it is the spices of everything together that makes this interesting. It is a very good album, and I am most certain that they will gain followers, at least from the more open minded section of the world population.
Here’s also a couple of more pre-listens in the videos for ‘Skyline escape’ and ‘Origin’ for your pleasure.
- Information
- Released: 2013
- Label: Self financed/Self released
- Website: www.amendfoil.com
- Band
- Lasse Mäki: vocals, guitar
- Juho Pelttari: guitars
- Ville Siivonen: bass
- Samu Honko: drums
- Tracklist
- 01. Blackleg
- 02. Scarlet bane
- 03. Origin
- 04. Amoebas
- 05. Heartless
- 06. Knives
- 07. Shipwreck
- 08. Stella nova
- 09. Welcome to stay
- 10. Skyline escape
