Realm - Endless war

Iron Horse? Endless war?
Are these guys anti-Native Americans?

Debuts have a tendency of being inconsistent, or lacking direction. Realm's first offering, Endless war is no exception. Thrashing away at high speed and full technicality at one moment, and the next beeing an acoustic piece, before you throw in a power metal-ish power chord riff to be modulated up and down, before you end it with a depressing, melancholic piece.

Lack of direction aside, the individual parts are all good. The riffs are of a high caliber, and quite a few stick out in your head after you finish the album. The solos are intense, and the solos are fairly technical. The aforementioned acoustic parts have highly memorable melodies, and in their own respect, they are very good parts. The guitar work in general has an extremely tight feeling to it, that is somewhat muffled by the production.



The Bass throughout this album is worth noting, as even though there are mixes where the bass is more audible, (and this album would benefit from a more prominent bass), you can tell that there is lots of awesome stuff going on down there. The times when the bass is prominent in the sound, however, you can tell that the instrument is getting a beating. The bass sound is almost as though it was slapped, and this creates a nice dynamic, and intense sound.

The vocals are somewhat special. The falsetto screams through the album might put of the average metalhead, but the performance is top notch, and the mid-range is plesant to listen to, with all the power you could wish for in his voice. Objectively the vocals are good, but one might not like the styling of them. Hit or miss.

Drums on this album is nothing special. they do their job, and do it well. Tight drumming and some nice fills around the album, but nothing that should not be expected.

Notable songs on this album include the beatles cover of Elannor Rigby, that has a good novelty appeal, that covers up the fact that it gets a bit boring after some time of mostly galloping around the chord progression.
Other good songs are "Slay the oppressor". having the beginning as a crescendo, with gradually increasing tempo. Then continuing with a highly technical and melodic thrash riff, then a slower chugging, yet thrashy riff, and the best solo on the album: dynamic, fast, technical and finished just as it needed to.
Finally, the ending song: "Theseus and the Minotaur", with it's power chord progression (mostly alike the verse on accept's "balls to the wall") ,technical riff and sudden changes of pace is a sweet ending to an album of generally good ideas.

The sad truth is that the songwriting here lacks the flow that true masterpieces have, even that of a "good" record. This all sadly pulls the entire score down to a preliminary 7/10 Though this might change, as i listen to the album more than the three times before this review.
(edit: now as i've had the time to let this grow on me i think of it as a 8/10) 

Realm - Endless War (mediafire)
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