Listening to the first two tracks told me that I’d be recommending Rewake to fans of In Flames and Soilwork. “Double Suicide” has aggression and freshness, and has Soilwork written all over it in the way the harmonies cut into the melodic aggression. In fact there’s one section which seems to be cloned from Soilwork’s track “Rejection Role”. It then transmutes into the sound and riffery of In Flames and by the second track “Slave”, we could be listening to this album to “Colony”. It’s all set up for a really good album.
Only the band can say what happened after that. I fully understand they wanted to showcase their own talents rather than sound like someone else, but what follows is largely dreary and repetitive. “ …of stars and the drifting” has an interesting oriental beginning and a good death roar but in spite of attempts to liven it up with some screaming vocals, it’s a bog standard rock/metal track with no magnetic qualities whatsoever. “Next in Line” is even worse and is utterly nondescript. The track which follows, “Unbeing”, is a nice, calming acoustic track but it seems as if there’s no pattern to this album. “Gold and Glass” has an electro feel, and the drums cut in nicely. The repetitious headbanging section comes too early, but in its favour the track has an acceptable mid-paced rhythm about it. “The Purpose” is back to the melodic In Flames style, which is welcome after the previous tracks, and has an added dimension in the good use of the keyboards. It has energy. Unfortunately the chorus lines are hackneyed and weak, a criticism I would level at the album as a whole. Emergency Gate know how to start tracks well and do so again on “Trust in Me” but it all goes downhill from there. After a lamentable ballad, the synthesiser cranks up the sound on “Elementor”. The guitar riff is catchy and repetitive, but there doesn’t seem to be the power in there to support the apocalyptic sample in the middle, which at least was diverting. “Life v 2.0” was another one with an In Flames feel. The riff is persistent, the guitar moves up and down the scale and the keys play their part, but it’s catchy more by repetition than through development of the soundscape in any way.
I found that even the better tracks like “Life v 2.0” suffered from not going anywhere. With this album, once you’d had the riff, you’d got it and almost without exception, there was nothing to capture the imagination. Some of the tracks were bland to start with, while others, notably the first two tracks on the album, had energy. With the different styles across the album and at the same time the lack of development within the tracks, the net result was that “Rewake” lacked cohesion and just wasn’t very interesting at all.
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