Memfis: The Wind-Up

Here's an album that's been pretty highly hyped up the last few months, the debut album The Wind-Up from Sweden's Memfis. Despite the questionable band name, The Wind-Up is serious stuff, taking influence from bands such as Mastodon, Opeth, Burst, The Dillinger Escape Plan, and Isis, then throwing in some original and polished sounds, making for a very enjoyable extreme metal album. Tempos sway from track to track, and there's lots of complex passages featuring intricate guitar and drum work, even some wonderful Opeth-like moments where the atmosphere creeps in with melodic acoustic guitars, like on "Forever Discounted". "Eternal Failure" has some weaving guitar lines that again recall Opeth, with a healthy mix of barbaric death metal vocals as well as clean melodic singing. The dark and menacing "The Judgement" packs a wallop, complete with shifting guitar riffs and intricate drum work, punctuated by harsh growls, while "Cover It Up" is a complex metal piece that combines Mastodon and Opeth styled arrangements and a myriad of vocal styles. If you like intense math-metal, look no further than "Dead Ends" and "Stop Those Waves", two speaker shredders with screaming vocals and wild instrumental interplay. The bands penchant for psychedelic and somewhat symphonic sounding metal, without keyboards I might add, can be heard on the excellent closer "Breed the Disorder", the CD's longest piece at just over 5 minutes.

The Wind-Up is one strong debut, and in all probability just the tip of the iceberg as far as what this band is capable of in the very near future. Memfis looks to be a great pick up for Candlelight Records here in the US, so scoop this up and hear what the European metal audience has been raving about for months.

Track Listing
1) Breathless
2) The Wind-up
3) Forever Discounted
4) Eternal Failure
5) The Judgement
6) Cover It Up
7) Dead Ends
8) The Game
9) Stop Those Waves
10) Save the Day
11) Breed the Disorder

Added: December 17th 2007
Reviewer: Pete Pardo
Score:
Related Link: Band Website
Hits: 2969
Language: english

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