Locust is a band from that land of darkness and death metal, Poland. They play an awkwardly brutal variety of the aforementioned brand of extreme metal; their first EP is mostly riff-based, but there’s not nearly enough variety or musician wankery to qualify it as technical death metal, and certainly not enough melody for it to fall under any other category. Two tracks, Repent Not and Sandstorm, the last track, both feature short, repeated chants; unfortunately, instead of being epic or hammerlike, it ends up simply wearing on the listener. Repetition proves to be Repent Not’s biggest problem, with too much repetition of riffs within songs and far too many blastbeats from the drums. In fact, the drumming is so blast heavy that I thought it was a drum machine, until the band’s bio informed me otherwise. While that kind of speed is quite impressive, metal is not made by speed alone. There is absolutely nothing else besides speed in the drums; no real rhythms, certainly nothing even pretending to be a fill. The production, apparently done in one of the band member’s home studios, is decent for that kind of amateur operation, but is still fairly lacking. The bass is usually very low in the mix for death metal; there’s enough raw high end to almost qualify Locust as blackened death. The sound quality itself is fairly good; the guitars are clear and the vocals easily discernible, if slightly thin. There is one exception to this rule of repetition. The title track is somewhat mind-boggling in its variety; it’s as if Locust wanted to create one song that displayed every riff, melody and effect they knew. While it’s possible to make songs with that sort of density, it takes a lot of skill to end up with something coherent; the individual elements have to be blended with a much defter hand than Locust collectively possesses. Unfortunately, they end up with a muddy, wandering song that seems to distract even itself. (Perhaps predictably, it’s the only song on the EP that uses more than a word or two of clean vocals; while it’s quite possible to do that in death metal, in something a straightforwardly brutal as Repent Not is trying to be, it’s not generally advisable.) For all its problems, Locust does show some potential. While the handling of the combination of elements on the demo is awkward, the elements themselves are all solid. The riffing is interesting enough, there’s just too much of the same riffs over and over again. If these guys can keep pushing themselves (and incorporate something other than blasting into the drumming), they might come up with some solid death metal yet. |
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Killing Songs : None. |
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