Requiem Demo 2012

Lör make some combination of progressive/power/folk metal. They sound progressive, like they borrowed either a rhythm or melody from Dream Theater and changed the other - the generic progressive metal sound where there's an odd rhythm and a pronounced modal sound. They sound folk metal, like their singer is one of a merry band of drunks who always seem to sing flat and have poor intonation - he'd probably be acceptable as a backing vocalist in one of those drunk folk metal bands who sing about drinking, because everyone would be too drunk to notice that he can't sing. They're not really a power metal band because the riffs and the vocalist lack power, but I guess they have similar forms and awful noodly, wanky solos to flower metal bands.

There are a few decent ideas in here, mostly stuff that sounds like modified versions of standard issue progressive metal. Unfortunately, these ideas are thrown into the mess of eight minute songs that have no flow nor direction. There's a dragged out two-minute intro to the last song that I suppose is supposed to be "atmospheric", as nothing really happens other than panning white noise, then the songs jumps right into a sweet power metal riff. Immediately following that, the band goes to a soft interlude that doesn't fit at all, then abruptly jolts back to attempting power metal where the riffs are fairly standard, but the singer can't lead the song. Before I complain about the singer any more, I'll hop around more than this song does - 8:33 long, and it sounds like five different songs chopped together. Awful songwriting, which makes it even harder to listen to these abominations.

Since it should already be quite apparent that I think this demo sucks, here's a laundry list of complaints about the band that need to be washed (with bleach) and ironed in order for the band to be presentable: The singer always sounds flat. The singer has terrible intonation. Directionless folk bits are thrown in haphazardly and make the songs sound even more disjointed. Everyone can sweep pick these days, it should not be confused with soloing. The band's logo is ugly. The singer almost slips into a speaking voice at times, and the singing is not enjoyable at all. There's a long drum fill that leads into what sounds like a drunken Dream Theater cover band trying to improvise the middle section to "Metropolis" and it leads into a horrible, sloppy guitar solo that contrasts strongly against the competent performances of the instrumentalists otherwise. That whole section is bad, that whole song is bad, and most of the demo is pretty awful.

To sum it up, Lör try to do a lot of things and they might be able to pull off one of them if they settled on it and corrected their disjointed songwriting and their singer learned how to sing, or used autotune. You're better off playing Russian Roulette with the "random band" button to your left than listening to this.