Artist: Dioramic
Title: Technicolor
Type: Album
Label: Lifeforce Records

These days, the unclassifiable metal scene seems in pretty good shape; you know the one I mean, the one that throws riffs together like a hungry drunk stuffing chips into his gob, along with a few cooler jazzier bits sprinkled in occasionally, like dustings of cocaine on Kate Moss’ coffee table. At least, Dioramic might seem that way at first, with the first few lurching riffs of opening track ‘Ghosts In The Machine’ straying very much into the midst of Between The Buried And Me territory. And so on in ‘Black Screen Goodbye’, but something appears to be missing in the midst of this bombast: while the ingredients are all present and correct, it’s not quite as spazzmaficated as you’d hope, a bit like an autistic child studiously colouring inside the lines.

It’s all brought home to you on ‘Eluding The Focus’ (which up to that point it has done), by virtue of sounding like a Muse B-side circa ‘Origin Of Symmetry’. It’s not bad, per say, and there’s some interesting ideas up to this point, but it just makes you realise how tame and shackled it all sounds. Maybe it’s because the vocals aren’t quite as manic you’d hope from the initial promise, overly using the clean tones you last heard in The Hateful Haircut, or whichever emo band is popular this week. Which is a shame really, as the musicianship on display really is top notch occasionally: ‘The Antagonist’ is actually much better than the preceding sentence would suggest, but still has the endemic problem throughout this album: the peaks aren’t high enough and the troughs are too shallow. It’s a sad reflection that unless you listen to this album carefully, you’ll be in the last quarter in what seems a blink of an eye.

Ultimately though, while boasting some intriguing passages, they’re few and far between. And on the likes of ‘Roses & Echoes’, which although boasting a few interesting turnarounds in the riffs, lurches with depressing regularity into a clean vocal passage just as the music is starting to get interesting. If you’ve previously filled your ears with the likes of Callisto, this album will come across as rather tame. Even this isn’t a disagreeable way to pass the time, it does sound like something a doctor would prescribe to a tech-metalhead if they’d recently come round from major surgery. It seems the colours (note the ‘u’) of this ‘Technicolor’ aren’t quite as vivid as we’d want.

http://www.myspace.com/dioramic

Steve Jones

MTUK HOME