乐队列表 Melodic Death Ethereal Collapse Categories

Ethereal Collapse are a melodic death metal band that hail from Pennsylvania, and I’m glad to say that they are actually melodic death, not the American version which is almost always metalcore-y. There is not a single breakdown to be found on this EP, which is a rather refreshing thing in these ‘chug chug slam’ days. ‘Categories’ is a concept EP, just over 16mins long, dealing with different branches of philosophy. It’s a tight, well written and well played EP, full of soaring melodies and plenty of head bang thrashing moments. ‘Category II: Discovering the Absolute’ has a wonderfully melodic solo halfway through, and opening track ‘Category I: Slave to the Empirical’ has some of the same excellent moments. Vocally the band stick with a traditional melodeath approach, there’s not too much variety in it, but it is quite refreshing for there not to be clean vocal choruses in this genre, so that is a plus. I love the riff that opens the last track, ‘Category III: Architect’; its a great section of arpeggio riffing that then breaks into a nice heavy Soilwork-esque riff. I notice that these guys are unsigned on their Metal-Archives.com profile, which I think is a damn shame. The EP shows more than enough promise to earn them a label. They’re one of the better melodeath bands I’ve heard from the USA. They may take a huge amount of influence from the Scandinavian scene (Gothenburg in particular, but there’s definitely some Bodom/Kalmah in there too), but this EP shows that they have the ability to forge their own identity if given the chance. Now hopefully they can get signed and bring their melodic metal to the masses. We Europeans would lap it up, that’s a promise.