Lista de los grupos Nu Metal Embrace Agony Path to Redemption

Embrace Agony hail from New York and have existed since over a year. I’ll admit I’m quite clueless about their line-up because they seem to have problem maintaining a stable one. First time I checked they myspace page two weeks ago, there were four dudes (technically speaking three dudes and one dudette) and just now that I decided to write my review it looks like “Matt Conti” got kicked out of the band. Even more clueless because it seems that while releasing their EP “Path to Redemption” in June this year they were looking almost right after for a new frontman so I have no idea who’s really singing on this demo EP. Does it matter? Well, that’s what we’ll see.

Path to Redemption is a nice appetizer. It consists of 4 tracks of about three minutes each that you can listen to on their myspace to give yourself a better idea.

The band says they’re playing Groove Metal. That’s probably not telling you much. Hell, I find groove in porngrind but also in Whitesnake or Candlemass… So let’s take a closer look… it’s… not porngrind (I can tell: there are no porn intros…), it’s not the band of the (still?) handsome David Coverdale, and it’s definitely not slow enough to be Doom. Let’s call a spade a spade, what we have here is Nu Metal. I know that for most it has partly become an insulting and pejorative term but I’m not one to beat around the bush.

What you have here is a typical mix of clean vocals that alternate with harsher ones. You know like the lyrical expression of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one day you’re pissed and thrashing the whole damn place, the other day you’re just Mommy’s little angel. Except it all happens in three minutes time.
I really much appreciated the cleaner side of the vocals rather the harsher one. Wimpy, wimpy? Not quite… it’s just I could find more emotions in them something very much a la Maynard James Keenan, and the music behind reinforcing this expression like if I were listening to some hidden track in my Mer De Noms CD. The harsh vocals however are executed satisfactorily but you don’t get the necessary, the required anger to make them memorable.

Musically, it’s also a good melting pot of various styles. As I wrote before, I had gotten that A Perfect Circle feeling notably on Scars. I’ll pass you the various things I think got through my ears, sometimes it’s thrashy, sometimes it’s a la Tool, sometimes… But then upon listening to the myspace tracks, I was getting very much frustrated. Oh it wasn’t the poor sound of myspace (well, it was to a certain extent…), it was something deeper that I just could not pin-point for some stupid reason.

It took me quite a few days but eventually as I was taking my monthly bath, I shouted “Eureka!” Or more precisely: Acid Bath. Which was fortunate (yes, yes, pun intended…).

Embrace Agony’s music screams Acid Bath from everywhere. I know you guys might not be uber familiar with the ill-fated Louisiana band but I am. This kind of mixture between sludge, hardcore, typical American rock and the alternating clean/harsh vocals that’s all you need to know to picture Acid Bath’s sound and… Embrace Agony’s. I won’t complain much about that. It’s not like the band is total rip-off of Acid Bath, it’s just they’re kind of perpetuating that kind of music very atypical but yet with their own style.

I’d like to say this came as a rather good surprise. With that kind of moniker, I must admit I was expecting something more Death Metal and my first reaction was “fuck it, I’m not reviewing this”. But then I’m glad I did give the band more than your conventional one-ear try. This is good music. Oh nothing ecstatic or anything fanboyish, just plain good music. I would gladly welcome a hard copy of this for I feel that the low myspace bitrate is killing those songs one play at a time.

I hope that the line-up issue will soon be something of the past for the band and that they actually can work together and release something less “demo” and more “LP” with their own damn sound. They have potential to do something huge but just as in any band, that potential may be wasted or even worse never looked at. Keep doing what you’re doing, and do it better. Don’t try to “commercialize” your sound just because it might sell a hundred more copies. Explore that sludge potential and release a damn good record.