lista zespołów Progressive Death Argus Panoptes Demo 2011

God bless demos! They’re short!

Well, I had no clue what I signed for when I accepted to review Argus Panoptes’ Demo 2011. I read “Progressive Death Metal from Canada” and thought: “sure, I can deal with this; it’ll probably sound like Mitochondrion”.

I was wrong. Argus Panoptes plays… some kind of Death Metal. At least I knew it was Death Metal or something close to it because of the singer’s growls. Besides this one “peculiar” element, the rest is just pure madness. The drums seem to do only that kind of syncopated “tick, tick, tick, tick” and feel more like a drum machine with the same programming on each and every song. The previously mentioned growls are ok, but nothing really outstanding and they have no variety at all… The guitars? I almost can’t tell if there’s any other than some leads or what sounds like Ministry samples. And why is that, would you ask?

Because the whole freaking thing (well, it's only three songs, thank God!) is plagued by overwhelming keys. And not just any keys: good ole vintage casio keys which would make The Gathering's Always sound like Giuseppe Verdi. Of course, Argus Panoptes’ keyboardist knows how to play. I'll grant him that. But maybe it’s because the rest of the band can’t play that they chose to put the keys in such an invasive fashion. By comparison, Nocturnus sounds raw and crude like fucking Beherit!

I played this demo three times and won’t play it any longer. This is exhausting music, even more so than Portal or the aforementioned Mitochondrion. Industrial Prog Cheesy Epileptic Death Metal… This is more than I can take though usually I like the “weirder” things. Not this time. For the band’s credit, I’d say there’s an awful lot of progression and if they could balance this whole thing, it might even be interesting but at this stage, it’s not worth contacting webzines or labels.