The Light

Similar to the challenge proposed a week or so ago between the reviewers Metantoine and BastardHead, I decided to try out a similar challenge with the latter reviewer: each of us picks a band totally out of the other's comfort zone and the other one has to take a shot at reviewing it. He's off reviewing one of my pet shitty black metal bands, and meanwhile I got stuck with ReinXeed. If you've read any of my reviews at all you'll know I'm most familiar with bands who sound like pigs and slam their way through full-lengths rather than cheesing through them. This is wholly out of my range of experience; I actively listen to maybe one Europower band and they're a biannual listen at that. Nevertheless, my favorite band cheeses out the wazoo despite being death metal, so I think I'm able to come to a semi-solid opinion on this album while judging it by the genre's standards. And all-in-all, I find The Light to be a superficially entertaining experience, even if it's flawed in a bunch of niggling ways.

I'm pretty sure this is the sort of thing that even diehard power metal fans would agree is on the more saccharine side of things. Everything cheeses more relentlessly than an exploding Velveeta factory, every single riff sounds majestic (at least in the stereotypical sense of the word) and everything just sort of soars over the musical soundscape. I find that I have the most fun with this album when the guitars are hammering away on fast but slickly clean tremolo riffs while the drums are stuck on fast tupa-tupa beats like a broken record. I personally like my power metal devoid of ballads and instead dominated by propulsive but controlled bursts of speed, and ReinXeed certainly deliver in that regard. Occasionally the music gets polluted with slower sections and quick stop-start "breakdowns" (I don't know what else you'd call them? They're rhythmically a breakdown but don't sound anywhere near metalcore in execution... whatever) that kind of ruin my powerboner, but they're mercifully brief and the band never dwell on them for too long. The guitar solos are often dizzying in their technicality but always sound based on enough conventional melody to avoid sucking. Hell, I'd even say they're a delight to listen to on this album, which is a compliment I don't dole out very lightly. Even the instrumental guitar masturbation track at the end of the album is somehow full of cool and captivating soloing and I find it downright entertaining to listen to. Aside from the aforementioned occasional slowdowns, the only complaints I have about the instrumental framework of The Light is the drum kit, which must be triggered because every aspect of it sounds like a stupid plastic version of the real thing. The snare, in particular, "clicks" more than it "snaps" and I feel like the music suffers grievously for it - power metal should feel fluffy, but not fake or synthesized.

The Light is packed with a rather ridiculous amount of symphonics, to the point where almost every riff is just totally slathered in cheesy programmed strings or piano noodling. I'll admit it gives the riffs a bit more force; all things considered, it offers them a boost during the more energetic sections that would leave the music feeling rather plain and uninteresting in its absence. The entire set of synths sounds really cheap and plastic to some extent, and there are a couple of really synthetic-sounding keyboard tones that really grate on my nerves, but I suppose it's best to deal with them because I can't really imagine the album without them. What I can imagine being removed from the music with no negative consequences are the stupid and overindulgent symphonics-only sections, which aren't awful, but they tend to drag around like cheesy G-rated movie soundtracks and don't bring anything to the table that the power metal parts don't already provide. The penultimate track "End of This Journey" has a lot of bullshit like this, the purpose of which is seemingly only to artificially double the song's length and establish it as the "epic" of the album. They're also more often slow and plodding than not, which doesn't really break the pace of the music as badly as it could but renders my powerboner flaccid because it's not fast and ripping stuff.

The vocals are...okay. It might be slightly more accurate to say that they're kind of sitting on the fence of mediocrity and dangling their legs over on the shitty side but not putting their feet on the ground. They're somewhat weak, and lack any particular definition aside from the vocalist's Swedish accent and a bit of an annoying, vaguely John Arch-like nasal tone. He can hit the higher falsettos but not with any extraordinary force or power, and his voice tends to lose strength the higher he soars through his register. Basically I really wish the vocals on this album were a lot more in-your-face and direct - they oftentimes feel too quiet for the music and get sort of drowned beneath the various instruments when they should constantly be exploding with conviction right next to my eardrums.

The riffs here are mostly just good instead of great, but ReinXeed show that they're more than capable of making coherent and interesting songs out of them (though from what I understand this is a more straightforward genre to write songs for than, say, slam death metal). I obviously have very little interest in this type of music all-in-all, but The Light is a decent debut album (especially considering that, aside from the drumming, everything here was organized and performed by only one guy!) and I guess this might appeal well enough to diehard power nerds who like any album that spurts cheese instead of blood when stabbed. Having said that, I'm off to listen to "Phallus Decapitation" over and over until I start to feel like myself again.