Italian metal, extreme or not, has rarely floated my boat over the last 25 years or so and I wasn’t expecting much from these technical metallers who plain annoyed the hell out of me on this album. The moment the bruising riff opened up on “Deathless” the album starting track I actually smiled thinking this is it, the metal band from Italy I’m really going to enjoy. The bands technical aspects were forgiven initially but unfortunately as the track progressed things became very chaotic and puzzling. When the band sticks to pure death metal it comes across as a poorer Morbid Angel. Ebola’s penchant for experimentalism creates songs lacking cohesion and structure as “Towering Delight” is all over the place. The clean vocals were actually OK and complimented those sections very well.
In fact the vocal delivery is schizophrenic to say the least as the guy screams, wails and barks continuously. As I write this and listen to the album I feel frustrated and disappointed that a band that can construct such good riffs can’t sequence them in such a way as to make a well crafted song. “To Your Demons” offers a little of what I want but even here the music balances chaotically on a knife edge between all out assault and ridiculous complexity for complexity’s sake. “Blessing In Disguise”, an instrumental, works well with a reasonable chug riff and double bass before the song unfolds into a half-decent thrash melody and nice lead work, only to be spoilt by a pointless semi-acoustic break at the end.
I can’t help thinking that this would be a total mess live with riffs chopping and changing for no apparent reason. There are loads of great riffs on this album such as the couple that start “Grind Revenge” complete with a well controlled blast, but even here the track veers off into pointless weirdness. “Nothing Will Change” has excellent riffs, melodies and styles that seem to have been placed in a musical blender and just poured out, without thinking about the end result.
http://www.myspace.com/ebolait
http://www.coprorecords.co.uk/Casket/DisplayBand.asp?ID=112
