Thursday 23 June 2011

Taken By The Tide - There Is No Such Thing As An Athiest In A Foxhole


Bad News Records 2010

1 Intro 2.Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea 3.The Circling
4.She Looks Like A Dead Heat In A Zeppelin Race 5. And The Sharks Took The Rest.

Eerie sampled intro breaks out into a sludge-laden crawl and discordant riffs burst from the speakers giving opening track ‘Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea’ an almost schizophrenic feel, crawling around in a swamp of nasty riffs and tortured vocals. It’s quite heavy going for an opening track, the usual time signatures ignored in favour of something very different. More 'stop start' madness than 'four-four' normality! ‘The Circling’ pretty much follows the same path, crawling along, buried in a tangled mass of sludge-laden guitars and pounding drums. ‘She Looks Like A Dead Heat In A Zeppelin Race’ breaks the mould, introducing blast beats and guttural vocals which are a welcome change! The song opens things up and shows TBTT’ s more death metal approach to song writing whilst retaining the ‘tech’ edge but never feeling quite as claustrophobic’ as the previous tracks. If any reference point were needed, then Soilent Green springs to mind.
 
Final track ‘And The Sharks Took The Rest’ returns to the overpowering sludge once more. Each track on this e.p. has a tortured feel, the band are obviously taking out life’s frustrations on their chosen instruments. Metalcore and Thrash were mentioned briefly in the bands press release, but neither of these genres are present throughout the duration of the disc. However, the press release then goes on to say that TBTT are more ‘forward thinking’ in the way they construct songs, which is true, each track shows intelligence, shows a band not just willing to throw a bunch of riffs together and call it a song. This e.p. won’t be to every extreme metal fans taste, mainly due to the genre TBTT have placed themselves in (Sludgy Tech Metal). However intelligent the song writing, none of the songs ever fully opens up or ‘gets going’, but there again, that’s the nature of the beast! Intelligent, enthusiastic and well played things do become suffocating when listening to this, but maybe it was TBTT’s intention to suck the life from you anyway!
6 / 10

No comments:

Post a Comment