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Mordred > Vision > Reviews > Noktorn
Mordred - Vision

mostly blind - 38%

Noktorn, April 21st, 2010

Apparently at some point Mordred was a metal band, but characterizing this as anything but progressive/funk rock with some minor metal overtones would be a huge stretch. 'Vision' resembles mid-era Faith No More more than anything else, just not executed as well- I'm not entirely sure who this is designed to appeal to but it seems like the audience can't be that wide. Funk and metal don't have a whole lot of similarities, and Mordred really isn't talented enough to combine such disparate ideas into a working whole. If anything, this is a sporadically interesting curiosity, but for the most part the combination of genres is just grating and inadvisable.

Besides Faith No More, there's a substantial Dream Theater influence in the proggy songwriting and especially the total LaBrie-worship vocal stylings. I suppose this release is sort of designed to not appeal to me- I don't like prog, don't like funk, and don't like arbitrary combinations of the pair- but it seems to me the way these are joined together is especially incompetent. The 'metal' elements generally come in the form of some Faith No More power chord riffing which tends to pop up seemingly randomly in the songs. Long stretches of essentially pure funk rock are interrupted rather rashly by the metal elements, and if anything, this is a worse release because the band ham-fistedly jams these more aggressive elements into what are otherwise laid-back songs. In addition to this, the 'aggressive' portions feel particularly half-hearted, as though the band really just wants to play funk but feels the need to keep their older audience through the inclusion of metal elements. Everything about this suggests it, from how infrequent the metal is to the flaccid, half-distorted guitar tone. I'm not very well-versed in proggy funk, but I suppose those sections aren't awful; the vocals tend to be irritating but the instrumental passages are good enough for background listening if nothing else. Either way, the metal is essentially useless and actually makes rather bland if listenable music much worse due to its inclusion.

This is a relatively obscure and fairly pointless little item doomed to be ignored by the metal scene because of the funk and the funk scene because of the metal. Drastic fusions like these tend not to work out because they're too busy straddling the line to bother with writing good music- and 'Vision' is a perfect case. Frankly I doubt that earlier material by these guys is that much better; this alone is skippable.