Echoes from Beyond

It keeps amazing me how many talented but completely unknown there are out there. Buxom Prime is yet another band I just happened to bump into when randomly cruising the archives. Buxom Prime was founded in 1996 as a foursome. It took them three years to release their debut demo “Maiden Voyage”. The band went through some line-up changes, with eventually only two of the founding members remaining in the band. No wonder it took them another five years to release their sophomore demo EP “Echoes from Beyond” I’m reviewing here.

Buxom Prime’s style would be best described as a hybrid between Melodic Hard Rock and Heavy Metal, somewhat reminiscent of classic 80’s metal/hard rock, but in no way sounding outdated. I must admit I’m by no means an expert on Hard Rock/Heavy Metal, I heard my fair share of classic songs from the genre though and if I say that the band has written some great songs, take into consideration that I’m just a casual listener of the genre.

The EP kicks of with “Life of Gold”, which is a good example of the style of music that is featured on the disc. The song starts with a metal riff, but slows down when the vocals kick in, which are accompanied by an acoustic passage. These tempo changes re-occur a few more times and are pulled of with ease. The song features an instrumental passage in the middle with a nice driving guitar lead. Next up is “Drops of Reign”, a calm track which relies on acoustic guitars for the first half, but unexpectedly turns into a metal track when the distorted guitar kicks in. Nice! This combination of melodic calm passages and metal bursts seems to be the bands strength and they used it to create some great songs.

The vocals on this EP are handled by Christine Butselaar. She does not have the powerful rock voice you would expect for the type of music, her voice rather has a sort of soothing quality. Surprisingly though, it works like a charm. Probably also because the band chose to structure the songs in such a manner that the vocals mainly occur in the calmer parts of the songs or do try to compete with the guitars.

Sadly, the band has many qualities, but productivity is not one of them. Seeing their release history I’m afraid it will take some more years before they offer us new material, but I’m certain it will be worth the wait. In the meantime though, you can check out the solo project of Herman Verhoef (one of the founding members) entitled “Restless Moon”, which just released it’s first demo and is planning a double album release in the near future.