“Post Hardcore” was how this 5 track work was presented to me. Unfortunately there were no track titles, nor could I find any listing on the band’s web site, so I couldn’t tell you what this is about. In fact this statement applies generally. “Prologue” is quite a mixed bag. What I heard on the first track was some deliberate and thoughtful build-up. Not so impressive were the vocals, which in some respects reminded me of Peter Gabriel, but in any case didn’t capture the metallic emotion of the guitar work.
The next track started in a dark and purposeful way. The sad and melancholic framework was all too brief as it all changed and I lost empathy from here on as all sense of structure was lost. There’s dark emotion but it’s just utterly cacophonous. If this is supposed to be some sort of experimental hardcore, then I just can’t see the attraction. I could detect an element of mathcore, a genre I’m admittedly not normally overkeen on. The next one set off on the same aimless and structure-free journey. Of course there’s a few guys playing what loosely might be a tune, but I just couldn’t get close to it. I don’t expect Aled Jones and consider myself well versed in metal vocals, but the singing is terrible.
It must have had an impact on me but not a good one because by the fourth track I began to wonder if I was sober. It’s like what happens if you’ve had a good night out, you put a record on and it’s spinning round your head. The out of tune singer fitted into the scheme of things very well. Was I impressed by the anarchy of it? No. The distortion is fine but there’s no continuity or structure. Strangely it did lead into the fifth and final track, on which there is a nice light section of post-metal, a good pace change and even a musical richness about it at one stage. I wondered if the patchy singing was deliberating ruining it, or if it was just plain bad. My mind had gone by this stage, so I can’t offer a view on this.
The Final Sigh are not a particularly new band so I don’t think it’s not a case of being overwhelmed with undeveloped ideas. There’s either something missing here, or I’m missing something. I simply do not understand what they were trying to do on “Prologue”. All credit to the band for following their instincts and producing something like this, but I think that even if I listened to this a hundred times, I couldn’t like it. Hopefully the good people of Leeds and York, where The Final Sigh come from, have more of an ear for this sort of thing.
http://www.myspace.com/thefinalsigh
