Meaningless Movements
When most people hear the words Brazil and thrash metal in the same sentence, one name would spring to mind above all others. It's been almost thirty years since Sepultura made their first significant stamp on the genre, yet no Brazilian band since have had anywhere near the same impact. With the release of Sao Paulo four-piece Esdrelon's debut album, this seems unlikely to change.
Opener Agonizing In Faith paints the picture for Esdrelon's sound straight away, and it's not a particularly brilliant picture. The ideas are all over the place, comparable to somebody attempting to finish a jigsaw puzzle by forcing all the wrong pieces together. Switching between low and high-pitched death metal growls, changing tempo, adding acoustic moments in between the thrash metal; countless bands have attempted all of these and pulled it off without sweating too profusely, but there's something about the structure and the quality of the songs here that just doesn't sound right. The instrumentation is sloppy and often out of time, and the band just don't sound they're gelling together very well. The vocals aren't particularly strong, the bass guitar is overly high in the mix and the transition between different parts of the song are lost in a muddy puddle of awkwardness.
Living In Contradiction is even worse and almost painful to listen to. Thankfully, Voices Of The Exile lifts the band out of the hole they dug themselves at the beginning of the album; at least it does once the ridiculous intro has finished. The band finally manage to hold everything together and create a solid heavy metal song in the process, ending on a decent Maiden-style riff and proving to an already-somewhat-jaded reviewer that seven minutes of Esdrelon isn't necessarily worse than five or six minutes of Esdrelon. The breakdowns in Ideology are entirely soulless, although the guitar solo is a vast improvement on previous efforts. They're still not very good at transitions though; the blastbeats of Fucking In The Name Of God sound completely out of place, although the band redeem themselves immediately and it ends up being one of the stronger songs on the album.
As it turns out, they saved the best song for the title track; Dust In Our Eyes introduces an altogether different side of the band, a slower, more refined Esdrelon who sound a lot more comfortable and in their element playing around with moody melancholia and more Maiden-laden guitar riffs. Bizarrely, they then decide the song requires an acoustic folk-metal breakdown; not a bad thing by itself but ridiculously out of place within the scope of the album.
Overall, Dust In Our Eyes fails to live up to expectations. The majority of the album comprises of poorly crafted and poorly executed thrash and death metal songs, with only very occasional glimmers of hope. Unfortunately the two or three decent songs don't do enough to save an album that is almost entirely devoid of anything remotely interesting, so here's hoping that time and experience will allow Esdrelon to step up their game and come back a lot stronger with their next release.