Eufori

I've followed this band for a while, after discovering them on "Myspace". I've always thought that they seem a little bit too influenced by some bands, I will come back to that later. So what do we have here? Apati consists of three members, portraying their angst and pain. The lyrics on "Eufori" are about feelings, depression, alcohol abuse, death and so on. The style of the music is some kind of mixture between black metal and rock, with several acoustic guitar parts and some keyboard added. But the vocals make this sound like a depressive suicidal black metal album. The vocals are mostly screamed in a harsh way, but also spoken with a thin layer of distortion added to them. The band uses some samples, mostly from Swedish movies, among those "The Seventh Seal", one of the most sampled movies from Sweden ever, so it does not sound original and does not add anything.

Apati obviously used a drum machine on this album and the sound of it is very poor and they seem to just keep the tempo, nothing else. They made this record sound much more plastic than it probably would sound with real drumming. The song-structures are pretty good though, and some fine parts can be found here and there, but not many. The music are melancholic and pretty atmospheric and sound alright upon listening for the first time, nothing that grabbed my attention though, after having listened to this record for about 15 times (to be able to make this review) I still haven't found a single thing that makes my eyebrows rise. And I don't feel that I want to listen to it again, since there is nothing special on it, nothing that hasn’t been done much better before, and almost everything feels so taken from other bands.

And that thing is actually what disturbs me the most about Apati, that they are so obviously, unhealthily influenced by other bands, such as Lifelover, Woods Of Infinity and of course Shining. Nothing wrong with taking influence from other bands, every band on the earth does it, but in this case it's so obvious that it almost makes me laugh and puke at the same time. When comparing them with Lifelover for example, things are very alike in many ways, especially the lyrics and song titles. I will not go further in to that, I guess this will be obvious to anyone comparing. The vocals sound very silly to me, like the guy is trying to imitate someone, failing hard. There is some good guitar work on this album, but not enough, and it many times it just feels like listening to Shining with programmed drums. Not that I'm a fan of Shining, but at least they do it better than this.

I would not recommend this album to anyone wanting something that last more than 1-2 listens. It's not original(not easy these days though), it does not feel personal and the whole album lacks an own identity. I really can't give this album a high score and it certainly doesn't deserve it. I really can't say any nice words about this album, so I'll just be quiet now.