Unscathed

There are countries that we aren’t used to talk about metal, especially the nations that are in zones like Asia or Africa, but things are slowly changing. This time, we’re presenting Svengali, a metalcore band that hails from the United Arab Emirates and have released their debut EP “Unscathed” a few months ago.

The main characteristic of this band can easily be the tense and compact guitar chords that are accompanied a lot by the drums’ double pedal that explodes countless times. This is a tool that creates a strong, yet a little bit repetitive, sound like a kick in the stomach.

The usual metalcore choruses including clean and melodic vocals are, of course, part of this EP, but with the distinctive fact of not being the standard mawkish and teenager chorus that this genre has accustomed us. Of course there is a considerable amount of melody in it contrasting the aggressive stanzas, but I believe that’s majorly well applied. We can even find a female singer in the track “The End”. About that song, there’s an alternative version based on the piano lines that can also be heard in the, let’s say, original one. In this alternative version, the vocalist Adnan is completely replaced by the female one. Still talking about Svengali’s melodic side, the melodious lead guitar has a strong presence in the choruses alternating with the heavy guitars that fill the stanzas, like previously mentioned.

Svengali are labeled as industrial metalcore and they do deserve this labeling since during the EP we can find electronic soundscapes, like in “Conquer” or “Free All”, that may not be like hydraulic machines, but can be imagined like bits and bytes running in futuristic circuits.

With this debut work, we can absorb the catchy personality that these Arabs inculcate and, in the near future, they can be seen as a metal icon coming from countries that aren’t so friendly about new things that emerge out of their conventional spectrum within their society.

Originally written at www.againstmagazine.com