Heretic Rapture

I’ve never heard of this WITCHBREED group before, and even if I did I’d be a bit hard pressed to check them out, even out of extreme curiosity. The name itself conjures a Cleopatra Records best-seller (and we all know Cleopatra unleashes serious winners…am I right, people?) as opposed to some kind of extreme metal entry. And this same hesitation was present when it came down to listening to this bad boy for review purposes.

And as it stands, it’s OK. At best.

What we have here is a strange circumstance…a competent “patchwork” band. The overall compositional process seems akin to grabbing a big handful from the twenty-plus years of extreme metal’s existence, tossing it against the wall, seeing what sticks, and using it. What’s there to behold? Blackened symphonic gothic melodic deathrash metal? Could that even exist in a past world? Well, either way, this WITCHBREED group has it in spades, with differing results depending on the actual songs. The band itself is quite above average in their performance, where thankfully underscored keyboards (it would’ve proven far more problematic if the keys too the high road in this), impressively-played guitar tandems and percussive bashing combine into a smorgasbord of amorphousness that comes in at several directions at once, not sticking with one sound; whether it’s the pitch-black gothic spires that surround “Symphony of the Fallen”, or the power metallic “Rebel Blood”, or the hypnotic sensations of “Firethrone“, the album keeps the listener a little too occupied for his/her own good. And at the helm of this experimental experiment is a lead, female vocalist (reminding me a hell of a lot of Simone Simons) who lays it on a little too thick sometimes, as if she’s trying to push her vocals past the morass of riffs and symphonic wildness. While this is better than a lilty waif of a gawth chick singer, her upfront personality can prove a little too distracting from the full-on band performance…a mild hindrance, if you will.

So all in all this was an OK album from an OK band. While I’m one to applaud a multi-genre approach, you really need to know how to do so without sounding like you’re trying too hard. Sadly, WITCHBREED aren’t adept at that just yet, but the future can still hold more bearable fruit in the end.