Machinery -The Passing
Or can you? The vocals, you'd expect, would all be guttural and laden with doom. Slow paced, heavy guitar work, insane drumming and more distortion than a Salvadore Dali painting, but no! It doesn't really happen so much throughout the album really. Sure, tracks like Delirium in Vengeance are certainly Cradle of Filth-esque, but it's certainly not a running theme. Reason in Truth starts in a similar vein but doesn't hold the style for very long at all. The same is true for "The passing".
Dead man is a good representation of the album as a whole. There's a lot of wailing vocals that occur infrequently between long guitar solos. Most of the songs take a down turn with more minor scales starting high but winding down into the depths. As the vocals build, so does the drum pace.
Cold has some pretty nice, treble guitar going on. It's low on vocals and low on the bass-ey sounds in places. Still plenty of synth and very fast drumming. Bloodline is a little different from the rest - the obligatory slow song. It has quite a haunting introduction, with some tinny guitar picking, building into something a little more powerful. Plenty of synths in the background moving into faster paced drumming and guitar work. The vocals don't quite seem to suit the track however. They seem too flat although effort is certainly going into them. The track goes back to it's more gothic and haunting power metal flow towards the end, coming as it does, many minutes later.
Sadly, the songs don't really seem to have individual impact. Just one is enough to get a feel for the band and to be fair, each one is very good. It's just that the strange yet similar style and structure to each one tends to help them blend into each other. It is a good album however. Im still not so sure on the lyrics and individuality of the songs though. But im not laughing at the Black Metal nature of the album either. Each song seems to have elements of several styles in one and they are certainly long enough.
It's a good album. Its not Black Metal, nor is it out-and-out metal in the vein of Machinehead's latest offering. But it's worth a listen for sure!