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By Night: Burn The Flags
Scandinavian metal bands seem to popping up all over the place these days, and Lifeforce Records has just unleashed this new one from Sweden's By Night, a five-piece thrash/death/hardcore combo that combines relentless energy with technical profiency for a fairly potent brew. While it's fairly obvious that By Night have a strong addinity for fellow Swedes Meshuggah, their music is lacking in a few areas that make those metal juggernauts so successful. For one, as technical and precise as Meshuggah's music is, for the most part it all seems to make sense and tie together nicely. By Night needs to work on that aspect a little, as some of their songs lack direction and tend to sound too similar to the track before it. "Part of Perfection" is a perfect example of this, as the raging guitar riffs are all over the place, with no real pattern to them, and the maniacal vocals of singer Adrian Westin get pretty grating after a while. That's not to say that there aren't some good tunes here. On the contrary, you have a blistering & crunchy riff monkey called "One and the Same", the Slayer-influenced "Raise Your Voice", and the progressive instrumental "At the End of the Day", complete with lush acoustic guitars, cellos, violins, thick power chords, and gorgeous melodies. The band has the energy, and they have the chops, what they now need is to write some tighter, more cohesive songs, and add some variety to the vocals, and perhaps they will increase their chances of sounding unique and step away from the very crowded metal pack.
Track Listing
1) Between the Lines
2) Part of Perfection
3) One and the Same
4) Raise Your Voice
5) Completed
6) Behind in Silence
7) Unseen Oppression
8) At the End of the Day
9) Dead or Confused
Added: February 11th 2006 Reviewer: Pete Pardo Score: Related Link: By Night Website Hits: 3373 Language: english
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By Night: Burn The Flags Posted by Murat Batmaz, SoT Staff Writer on 2006-02-11 07:10:11 My Score:
By Night hails from Sweden and they're a metalcore band that plays relatively more intricate riffs and their songs contain plenty of complex passages, possibly inspired by Swedish gods Meshuggah. By Night's music is no where near as technical though, but still, for a metalcore act, they are fairly interesting.
However, vocalist Adrian Westin can get a bit annoying, as he sings the same way on all the songs with no variation whatsoever. The vocals are totally screamed, neither death growls or the earlier Slayer type of blackened thrash stuff. The best parts are those when Westin isn't singing, since that gives the rest of the guys a chance to play some great riffs and challenging leads. The triggered drumming on "One and the Same" or the Control Denied-type of guitar texture on "Raise Your Voice" would have been a lot more to my liking had they been developed properly. One problem with Burn the Flags is, while each song has some great ideas, none of them are fully realized and the track becomes aimless after a while, no matter how short it is.
Compared to Extol, Meshuggah, Entombed, and even Opeth by their label, I'll have to disagree with this assessment. By Night's music is modern metalcore with very small touches of Swedish death and thrash mixed in, but aside from some of the guitar licks by Andre Gonzales and Simon Wien, they're not too different from most other bands in this genre. Unless they refine their sound and work on their songwriting skills, I don't see them catching too many people's attention.
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