[Originally posted July 26, 2011]
Brainoil, now that’s a cool name if you ask me! I’m not too familiar with the sludge metal area, although I am a huge
Hellyeah fan, and I have heard some
Down stuff, and I have a
Black Label Society album. But otherwise, I haven’t really gone into much depth into the sludge lake. But hey! There aren’t very many things that I love more than listening to new music. Now I wasn’t particularly fond of the
Down stuff I heard, so that was kind of a bad first impression on sludge metal. But
Hellyeah has been a band I’ve been following their whole career, but they mix in some nu metal and some thrash in their bowl of sludge.
The first thing I need to note is that this is a pretty raw and poorly produced album.
And that’s not a bad thing at all because I listen to tons of poorly recorded stuff. So the guitars have the really thick, crunchy sound that I’ve heard in most sludge bands (and I love the sound of it too). I do hear some classic heavy metal influenced guitar riffs here and there which is good because it’s showing these guys have some inspiration going here. I’m also noticing that the vocals aren’t being sung, it sound like a dirty,
Sepultura-styled scream/yell almost. But the thing that’s really bothering me about this album is that the vocals are really quiet and I have to really listen in order to hear them clearly, so it would be a plus if the vocals were not so drowned out by the guitars, which are pretty much dominating everything else. I’m also having trouble hearing the bass. So most of these faults are just due to the crappy recording quality which is understandable because producing music isn’t the easiest thing in the world, it’s just something that takes some work. So maybe these guys should have spent a little more time perfecting the volume on each track so that you can hear everything fine.
Now the first song starts with the classic faded-in guitar feedback which sounds really cool if done well; and they definitely pulled it off in this song. The first track also has a lot of traditional heavy metal influenced guitar parts that actually sound really catchy. Ok now were on the second song…wait…I think I just heard the same intro that I did on the first song, did I not? Ok now we have some repetitiveness here, because I’m hearing the same type of intro for all of the songs except for two of them. It was great in the first song because it was a good album intro, but it shouldn’t be used anymore after that. This is also one of the slower metal bands which really give their music that thick sludge metal sound. So overall, not bad! But there are quite a few things that need to be worked on, but I see quite a bit of potential for these guys. This gets 11/20.
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