The Force Within

I think this is the sort of 'black metal' you get if you take a bunch of non-metal musicians, tell them to write a black metal release, and show them what black metal sounds like via 30 second clips of Cradle Of Filth on Amazon. Not even old Cradle Of Filth! This is one of those albums where you can sort of characterize it as clearly ATTEMPTING to be a certain genre, but kind of getting sidetracked or just not really having an idea of how to compose that genre to begin with. Interfector is black metal after a fact but I'd be hard pressed to think of any black metal bands that sound much like this.

What this essentially reminds me of is a fusion of 'Damnation And A Day'-era Cradle Of Filth with some rock and maybe a pinch of old Dimmu Borgir. The vocals are screechy and there's occasional tremolo riffing, but there's a lot more straight gothic power chords, rockish songwriting, and reverbed-out clean guitar sections. While 'The Force Within' is clearly a metal album, its sound is almost fundamentally 'unmetallic'. Even more distressing is how the ideas are combined; Interfector thinks nothing of having a blasting pseudo-black metal section right next to what is essentially an alt rock passage without any sort of reasonable transition between the two.

In short, the songwriting on this album is massively questionable. The band repeats themselves a huge amount; individual riffs are stretched way past their breaking point because the band doesn't seem to know how to establish variation through changes in rhythm, slight variations on a melodic theme, or any other device which can give simple ideas more longevity. This seems to be an album that was just sort of written straight through without much in the way of editing along the way. You'd think the band would have asked themselves why the Iced Earth song they chose to cover was about fifty times more compositionally complex than anything they'd done on their own, but I suppose not.

What it comes down to is that this is essentially rock music by way of black metal, which has never been something I'm extremely fond of. Weirder than that is that it seems that it was arrived at sort of unintentionally; the band desperately tried to make some sort of melodic black/death/gothic fusion and wound up with something which sounds suspiciously like a lot of the stuff I hear on the radio every day. It doesn't even really have catchy pop sensibilities; it's just very mediocre and kind of incompetent.

I'm not sure who this record is actually made for; what sort of goth kid is going to want to listen to this? Certainly not a lot of metalheads are going to greatly enjoy this bizarre mash of styles and ideas with little structural coherency. Anyway, there's stuff more unpleasant than this but there's still absolutely no reason to listen to it.