Antagonist Zero: No Tears

Antagonist Zero certainly has the ability to lay down some solid riffs. Just check out the openings of "No Tears" and "Profound Oblivion." Both tracks set things up beautifully, bringing plenty of power from the guitars and backing them up with Ben Pakarinen's growling. Of less interest was the band's shift to a style more post metal than doom metal. I generally don't have a problem with such blending—music must always be vibrant, seeking, and active. However, in this case, things sometimes fell away from the doom elements too much and too often. This isn't always true; "Profound Oblivion" successfully weaved the various musical components together in ways that seemed consistent, creative, and interesting. This band clearly has the chops to lay back into the groove of some pretty heavy doom metal; unfortunately, the balance between the styles sometimes feels inconsistent. Don't get me wrong, the clean vocals are nice, but they just don't quite work as well as they could have. "Suru" sounds the best, largely because the sound of the lyrics (sung in Finnish) is quite rich. The songs performed in English sometimes sound slightly out of tune, "pitchy" as they used to say on American Idol. I am reluctant to criticize the band too much for moving from doom into post metal. There's nothing wrong with making that turn, but there's always the risk that one will take over the other or that things might simply end up dull. In this case, the cleaner vocals took the band too far away from the doomier qualities of the music. The alternating style has never been my favorite and this record does little to convince me otherwise. Fans will be interested to pick this one up because it includes two cover tracks the band has been performing in concert lately: the first, a worked-over version of Jenni Vartiainen's original pop song; the second is a cover of a doom track by VS.

Track Listing:
1. No Tears
2. Profound Oblivion
3. Suru
4. Missä Muruseni On
5. The Lachrymal Sleep

Added: November 6th 2015
Reviewer: Carl Sederholm
Score:
Related Link: Band Website
Hits: 1473
Language: english

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