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Withering Surface > Scarlet Silhouettes > Reviews
Withering Surface - Scarlet Silhouettes

Weak melodeath - 40%

deadweight2, December 21st, 2008

If I had to review Scarlet Silhouettes in one word, it would be: meh. This is mediocre stuff. It's melodic death metal, but not especially melodic: most of the melodies seemed uninspired and boring to me.

The quality of the guitar lines is all over the place. In some tracks the guitars are pretty neat. In other tracks the guitars play very simple lines that make me think the guitarists phoned it in. All in all, there are some moments of enjoyable guitarwork, but it's not consistent. The drums are simplistic, and the band falls back to relying upon heavy repetitive drumbeats to heighten the aggression, which for me detracts from things. The band mixes in keyboards here and there but they didn't add anything for me.

The singing really didn't work for me. There is a black metal influence here; some might enjoy that, but not me. Some lines are screamed, a la black metal; others are growled, like you'd expect for a death metal band; and others are basically spoken aloud, which felt out of place.

If we ignore the black metal influences, there are a few decent songs here. The best track is probably the opener, "Scarlet Silhouettes", though for me it is marred by the screaming vocals and the weak drums.

All in all, this album is OK. It's listenable, but it's not great. I don't expect to listen to this again except occasionally, when I'm really desperate for variety.