Farther Paint - Lose Control
Lion Music
Experimental Progressive Metal
8 songs ()
Release year: 2008
Farther Paint, Lion Music
Reviewed by Thomas
Surprise of the month

Farther Paint hails from Italy and was picked up by Lion Music through MySpace. After reading the information sheet that comes along with the promo I approached this with great anticipation. They describe themselves as highly technical yet accessible, original and experimental progressive metal. My only concern was the vocals. The female vocals. A factor which seems to be so incredibly deciding within this style of music that it just has to be spot on to be appreciated. The band describes them as soulful which set my thoughts on something different than the typical operatic vocals most bands deal with these days. Regardless of how high my expectations were before listening to this, my recently unreliable judgment on Italian bands gave birth to my unhealthy skepticism…

…which the opener Lose Control sucked every sign of life out of, as this short yet stunning, atmospheric and perfectly executed instrumental piece sets the mood for the entire album with dark settings, great melodies and excellent guitar handling by Fransesco Federici. This flows smoothly into the moody Hold On which means our first encounter with the feared female vocals. Just to get it said, they’re absolutely excellent. They’re just as soulful as they’re described and there is not much operatic by them at all. If anything she’s leaning more into poppy territory as she has a great range and an appreciated soul-y thickness on the higher notes. A little unusual but it fits pretty well. The only slight issue is that the melodies tend to get a little too melodic, especially compared to the overall complexity of the songs.

The songs themselves are mostly complex and well-performed. However, the catchiness of the accessible melodies, the ripping slick leads, and the keyboard/guitar-duels makes this more than easy to get and love. Their playful instrumental handling is excellent which makes this as fun as it is awe-inspiring. There are however some stuff that may be hard to get at first. The keyboard-sounds are often fitting yet very odd, which will easily turn some heads in curiosity as well disgust, and could easily turn out as a love/hate-thing. For me personally, this is definitely positive as I’m a fan of weird stuff done right. As far as inspiration concerns this is, just as any other progressive metal band, inspired by Dream Theater, though not ripped off to the extreme extent as some other bands tend to do. The rhythm-picture on some of the songs are very similar to earlier and present-day Dream Theater. However, every band member seems to pour some of their own musical background into this, and a number of styles are well represented. Both jazz/fusion-y parts, electronica-layered stuff and bits and pieces of both blues and pop. This makes for an interesting listen and they manage to blend everything together and cover it in a metalized surface as well as being firmly rooted in the progressive grounds.

There is, despite all the great moments here, room for improvement. The production is quite flat and simple, and it lacks the inducement which would make this even better. Shortly put, you can easily hear that they’ve only got one guitar, and when the leads are ripping, it would be nice to have another guitar backing it up instead of the keys. The other issue is the drum sound. Until I saw the footage of the drummer in studio I thought this was programmed. The sound is really plain and lifeless, and if this isn’t programmed it is surely triggered to death. Everything is perfectly executed and technically flawless, it could however have sounded better with a livelier and more colorful production. Then again, this is their debut, and as we all know, recourses are often rather limited at that point of your career.

All in all this is a great debut by these highly skilled Italians. They’ve enthralled me with their sense for melody as well as advanced musicianship, and this will definitely be something I’ll keep an eye out for in the future. Words to sum this up would be diverse, melodic, experimental, technical and playful progressive metal. A definite sparkling star in the gigantic prog metal universe which definitely will be worth checking out if you want to quench your thirst for entertainingly technical music.

Promotional Video

Killing Songs :
Lose Control, Hold Me, No One Is Around Me, Ager, My Noise
Thomas quoted 84 / 100
0 readers voted
Average:
 0
You did not vote yet.
Vote now

There are 0 replies to this review. Last one on Mon Feb 02, 2009 5:00 pm
View and Post comments