Over the years Century Media have done a hell of a lot for girl power. Current and past artists include Lacuna Coil, Arch Enemy, The Gathering, Flowing Tears, My Ruin and more recently In This Moment, Luna Mortis and Unsun. If you have kept abreast (and no pun intended) of the metal news recently you will no doubt have seen mention of The Agonist. Vocalist Alissa White-Gluz (former Canadian Idol contestant) is incredibly striking for one thing and I was amused to see that the group are even promoting this their second album by allowing you to build your own coffin with a haunted widget. Apparently Alissa is an art teacher in elementary schools and shows you how to do this via the groups MySpace page. Although I was tempted, these sort of shenanigans were well practiced at a young age via ‘Blue Peter’ and I normally ended up gluing cut up washing up liquid bottles to my forehead or something similarly retarded.
So this said I am going to stick in this instance just to the music on the actual album. Are The Agonist hype or can they walk the talk? Well put simply they are not so much walking it as strutting it and they do it very well. What we get are aspects of sweetness and light, darkness and anger all replicated by the huge range of singing styles projected by the vocalist. Thrust into ‘The Tempest’ we get massive bellows, clean sweeps and little girly innocence. The instrumentation follows suit and matches this but emphasis is on the hard and fast almost death laden delivery. In fact this as times resembles a female fronted Cryptopsy (easy, those of you thinking that was what their last album was like anyway).
It is quite natural to have a band with a female singer adopting one style or the other but not many manage both so confidently, however Eths do instantly spring to mind as one such example. What the strained grunt at the beginning of second number ‘And Their Eulogies Sang Me To Sleep’ had the singer doing to replicate it is a worry but from there this number rampages away and really flies off the handle delivering a schizoid sort of brutalism which never stands still for a sec. As things develop we begin to see the skill of the musicians shining through, obviously not wanting to be outdone. Drumming is punishing and there are some swarthy neo-classical guitar chops bolstering things along. The other thing that should be added are the claims that this is an album that is addictive and by damn it is, catchy as it belts along and with some stunningly constructed clean sung choruses these lullabies may not always be soothing but certainly leave you hungering for more.
There are also piano and violin dropped into the mix at times and the group do say that classical music is inspirational. This is obviously at its most evident on their rendition of ‘Swan Lake.’ Not sure quite what Tchaikovsky would have thought of this but it is all sweetness and light with the chorals sounding really quite impressive.
When I saw the name of the band and thought about downloading it I was cringing thinking they were going to be one of those screamo Johnny Truant types. Glad that I was wrong and did not judge the book by the cover title. Opening it has unfolded a fairy tale with a Grimm but enjoyable bite, so all who enter need not necessarily beware. Great cover art too!
www.theagonist.net
www.myspace.com/theagonist
