Master of the Aire

When you want to stand out from the rest of the crowd you have to be unique in some sense, especially when it comes to heavy metal; many death metal bands have opted for technicality, others have included death growling females (as far as we can tell at least), others decide to breed two genres to produce a monstrosity that no mortal ears should have to bare presence to. Finally when all else fails, you can fall back on the gimmick; a novelty aspect to your music that makes people think 'How would they even get that to work?' Nine times out of ten it fails because the band's song writing has all the structural integrity of wet tissue paper, but of course where it fails in actual ability it succeeds commercially because people are fucktards. Enter Flametal whose claim to fame is the fusion of flamenco guitars with 'speed' metal.

Let's address a few notable problems; this isn't speed metal, don't go expecting riffs from 'Painkiller', 'Walls of Jericho' or 'Gates of Purgatory' because the riffs on this album range from fast heavy metal at best to mediocre hard rock at worst. The guitar tone is hollow so the riffs have no real bite and thus it makes them even more forgettable, in fact the only thing you'll remember about the guitar work is that you forget that they're even there really. The bass is actually somewhat decent and carries through quite nicely, whilst it does follow root notes the majority of the time it has it's moments to shine but mostly once all the other instruments have died down. The vocals are fairly odd however, he sounds like something you'd find off an early death/thrash album from the mid-80's; something akin to Possessed but a bit cleaner, sort of similar to early Death... it's not particularly great and in juxtaposition to the style of music they're supposedly playing it's jarring because it's giving off an evil vibe whilst the wimpy guitar tone puffs out a brain-dead riff that has about as much weight as a puff of helium, but without increasing the frequency of your voice unfortunately.

Of course that last paragraph is unimportant to the majority of you out there, no doubt you're listening to this album because it has a flamenco guitar and being an original idea to make use of it in a heavy metal band means it's going to make it a bajillion times more interesting to listen to. If you think this then I advise you find a fork and make it become intimate friends with Mr. Wall Socket. The flamenco guitar is quite impeccably played and is impressive when it does appear but it's shoehorned into the entire equation without any sense of reason nor with any degree fluidity, it just appears and then it goes away again. Had the entire feeling and sound of the album been geared towards having a flamenco flavour then it could have been integrated more smoothly.

I wouldn't say this album is a chore to listen to, it's just easy to leave it on and go about your business and be impressed by the flamenco guitar work. The problem being however is that everything else about the band is completely unimaginative and lacks any essence of heavy metal to it; there's no punch, no balls, no headbangable sections. The cynic in me is screaming to say that this band will never evolve and will continue to roll about in its own filth and excrement because they're arrogant and self-indulgent enough to assume that their inclusion of a far removed music style into heavy metal gives them an excuse to ignore any criticisms. Thus with that in mind it's best to keep your money and ignore this band, like a child throwing a tantrum in a supermarket they'll win the minute you buy that over priced ADD bar.