Artist: After Death
Title: Eulogy
Type: Album
Label: Self Release

All too often, you find a bands energy does not translate well from the live setting to the recorded medium. It can be down to a number of reasons. The fact that the band themselves cannot generate the same kind of energy in the studio, the production quality, or sometimes quite simply that the source material just doesn’t quite cut it. There’s much about After Death that makes me want to give them the benefit of the doubt, especially as a number of people had highly recommended them after catching a live performance earlier this year, but listening on record to their latest E.P. ‘Eulogy’, I was less than blown away. The London based 3 piece have talent, there’s no doubt in my mind about that, but repeated listens here have left me quite underwhelmed.

‘Eulogy’ opens with ‘Rite of Passage’, a supposedly atmospheric introduction, but it just turns out to be a waste of a minute. ‘Beyond Suffering’, opens promisingly enough, with an excellent, if well thumbed riff, however from here, whilst the guitars are certainly technical, they lack power and depth, and as such the talents of Marc Yacas and Leon Villalba go under appreciated. As ever, vocalist Barry O’ Connor manages to deliver a solid vocal performance whilst unleashing a flurry of fantastic drumming, putting me in mind of Demonizer. The vocals suffer however, when O’ Connor resorts to the hackneyed Metalcore impassioned melodic bit, a style which I am now so tired of, it makes me want to skewer my head with a large needle whenever I hear it employed. They really should stick to the death vocals which they do rather well. ‘We Are The Now’ is the most generic form of Metalcore, and when the line “I’m running out of patience” is being emotively howled, I’m really fighting the skewering urge. This sounds just painfully weak here, sounding like a budget version of As I Lay Dying. ‘Seeking Salvation’ is the most accomplished of the tracks on here, managing to refrain from the same old clichés here for the most part. The riff work is almost black metal in its bleakness, before the whole thing is completely ruined in the last minute by flurry of teeny impassioned emotiveness that left me slamming my head off the desk in frustration. Final track ‘In Ruins’ again has little to shout about, and really making me wonder what all the fuss has been about. The light melodic break in this one is actually quite well placed and executed, the vocals not sounding as out of tune and strained as on the earlier tracks, and there is a good melodic solo in there, but on the whole, nothing to raise it above average.

On the positive side of things, O’ Connor is clearly a much better drummer than he is vocalist, but fair play to him for having a go, after all, it can’t be easy to drum like that and sing at the same time, so I look forward to hearing if things improve at all now they have hired new frontman Kendo Ken. Another thing that becomes evident after a while is the lack of bass guitar. The sound lacks depth, something to give it some balls. If they can ditch the whiny factor, get some oomph into their sound, and if Ken can turn out to be a decent singer, then maybe I’ll be able to come up with something a bit more positive about their next release, but this, this is just weak.

http://www.myspace.com/afterdeatuk

Lee Kimber

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