Dwoom : "Pale Mare Demo"

Until the guitar solo came in I was thinking this sounds too good to be a demo. The vocals are very dramatic. I don't think they Candlemass , but if that is the first place your musical vocabulary goes then ...oh well. He does try with his phrasing to sound like Marcolin as the sound build ,he goes up higher and has a more soulful tone which is where I think he needs to keep exploring . These guys get mad props as the guitars are heavy as fuck and have a dense raw sound that is more brutal than anything Candlemass could have done in the 80s or 90's though Entombed was this heavy in the 90s so there you go. Entombed's "Wolverine Blues" album with more power metal vocals. But power metal is not equating to it's typical cheese here.

The second song and title track is not written with the same sense of perfection and is ok with just defaulting into the mire of more conventional heavy metal until it goes into a weird break with clean guitar. The vocals go lower and this helps break them out of the Candlemass like thing and into something heavier. When the guitars lock back in it's crushing. I was not expecting the more growled vocals to come with their manic declaration. So while the over all isn't as good as the first they throw you some curve balls. The drummer pulls out some double bass for "Empty Temples". They allwoow it break down into clean guitar and more Deep Purple like vocals. It feels like as songwriters they get their groove back on this one. It would not have been so noted on the last song, but when you only have three songs every minute counts. They continue to bury you in crushing riffs.

I'll give this one an 8.5, it's heavy as fuck it just didn't get a 9 as I think they could have fine tuned the second song a little. I do look forward to hearing more from these guys and hopefully a full length next time around. While they do sounds Swedish as far as what you expect from death metal, not what you expect from other genres out of their. I think these guys are onto something good and look forward to hearing their sound further refined and more of it next time as if this was a full length there would have been more to balance it all out with. I think it should also be noted that these guys never cross the seven minute line and managed to really pack a ton into each song so they know how to be efficient which more bands could stand to take note of.