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Cromlech > The Vulture Tones > Reviews
Cromlech - The Vulture Tones

Pretty interesting if kind of incoherent in places - 68%

Noktorn, March 20th, 2010

This is one of those releases I feel mildly unqualified to review, like it emerges from some scene or musical community I'm ignorant of, because I'm not entirely sure how to describe it: it owes a lot to Gothenburg melodeath, of course, but it has a more straight tech death edge as well as some gothic-tinged melodic ideas which remind first of early Cradle Of Filth, but then, much more strangely, Abigail Williams. Did that infinitely more popular band draw influence from this obscure little EP? It seems doubtful, but what it suggests is that there's a lot of obvious music that I haven't explored that both bands owe something to. Maybe some dark corner of Gothenburg I never really investigated? Who knows.

It's certainly interesting and seems to be a fairly even mixture of, say, early At The Gates and some of the more intrinsically death metal but technically proficient Swedish bands like Liers In Wait. Moreover, it seems to have a substantial metalcore influence, but not just by way of melodic death; some of the rhythms are too definitely hardcore-derived, as are some of the spastic sweep riffs, but still, the 2000 release date seems to make metalcore a somewhat premature movement for this to take influence from. Abigail Williams again comes to mind in nearly all dimensions: the riffing, the song structures, the hardcore edge- the pair seem much too similar to each other for this to be wholly coincidental. Hell, there's even a hint of blasting Swedish black metal on the title track; really, you have to hear this for yourself to really get what it sounds like.

The quality of the music is a little debatable; I like a lot of the riffs, and the band seems most at home in pseudo-metalcore passages with skank beats and furtive mute-and-pop riffing, but the band also suffers from a mild case of Opeth Syndrome, where the individual parts are good but typically fail to connect to each other in a meaningful way. A lot of the songs seem to be collections of mostly unrelated riffs, and, compelling as the individual riffs might be, they just don't form a very cohesive whole for the listener to grip onto. The technical performances are admittedly stellar, with extremely varied guitar techniques and a surprisingly nuanced drum performance which seems to emphasize a lot of strange, shuffling, almost funk-influenced hi-hat rhythms spread through the more conventional blast and double bass numbers. Still, I can't say there's any one track here which manages to occupy my attention from beginning to end, so my ultimate appraisal of 'The Vulture Tones' takes a hit because of that.

This is certainly a curious little EP, and it's kind of unfortunate that the band never did anything after this, as I could see them smoothing over their style of songwriting a fair amount and putting out something really worthwhile; they clearly had the talent to create something very strong with just a little more patience. But if this is their tombstone, I suppose that's not a terrible thing; it's certainly worth a listen or two for curiosity's sake and I think those more fully invested in melodic death metal may find more to appreciate than me.