“Consciousness Decay” is a winner most definitely, and yes folks, there’s even guitar solos here as well! If you had to sum up the sound of this band in one word, it would be scathing, as this quintet deliver tracks at a breakneck pace that are accented by strong melodic guitar harmonies and pummeling rhythms. With riffs that take cues from every style of metal imaginable, solid song arrangements and an overall delivery that is completely monstrous, this band takes on all comers here on “External Frames Of Reference”. Call it whatever you want to, The Red Death rips! In the here and now it will get branded as metalcore, largely due to Paul Hamblin’s raspy vocal delivery. In the '90s, a lot of people would have called this style of music death metal. Who knows? The moment to do so has long since passed anyway, so who really cares.
It is, for the most part, very boring, but it demonstrates what happens to those metalcore bands that are so intent on ‘giving the scene what it wants’ that they manage to sacrifice musical integrity in the process, because The Red Death, judging by the few merits of this album, could have challenged themselves with something far more creative than this. You can safely ignore this album in its entirety, because you don’t want this, you don’t need this, it will never make it to your record collection, and rightly so. To our collective chagrin, it was around the same time as the release of this album that, in a final effort to make metalcore mutually appealing to both sets of fans, some idiot proclaimed “I know, lets make the BREAKDOWNS heavier!”, which did all manner of disservice to those few bands that used them properly and any band that came close to using them in the future. Already the breakdowns are starting to feel like the back up plan of a band that is running out of ideas to make the music extreme enough to bridge the gap comfortably between hardcore and metal.
‘Before an Empty Throne’ starts with a truly odd choice of lead during the intro, again, which masquerades as something more dramatic than it actually is, while ‘Aftertaste of the Emaciated’ is a pointless exhibit of song writing that lacks direction, with its annoying, happy harmonies that the pounding drums just can’t turn into something meaningful.ĭespite some occasionally creative song structure and writing, the tell-tale signs of mediocrity are all there. Eventually it morphs into a heavier Iron Maiden-esque number, before the obligatory, unwelcome break down reminds us of the genre the band adhere to.įrom this point onwards, it feels like the only thing fuelling this CD is the same old rehashing of the ideas that everyone is sick of hearing. On the track ‘From the Height of a Thousand Years’, what is supposed to be a soaring, powerful intro is actually very uninteresting, but the fact that the riff stays with us throughout about a third of the song suggests that the band nevertheless believe it is better, or carries more musical weight, than it does in reality. However, what becomes clear is that The Red Death are definitely a band that believe first impressions are everything, as the stronger songs are wedged firmly into the first 10 minutes of ‘External Frames of Reference’ (apart from the boring heard-it-all-before ‘Consciousness Decay'), while the latter ¾ of the CD is pretty unimaginative by comparison. Pity that it doesn’t unify into something greater than the sum of its parts, but some credit is due to the band for at least trying to experiment with a few ideas here. The Kataklysm styled intro is a nice surprise, and it quickly transforms into some well-written (for once) At The Gates inspired riffs that crash into furious blastbeats. ‘Silent Machine’ is also worthy of a mention, even if it is just a collection of good ideas that fail to truly merge into a good song. Yes, there is a breakdown on this track, and the melodic riffs and harmonies do indeed soften the blow, but there is a palpable intensity here that is (was?) lacking in so many other similarly-minded bands. Opener ‘Frames of Reference’ is actually tinged with a few streaks of modern grindcore, the fast tremolo picking, furious blasting and screeched vocals calling to mind something closer to Brutal Truth or Rotten Sound than the watered down rubbish of modern day metalcore. Which is a shame really, as the better moments on this CD are quite good.
The Red Death dwell on the ‘metal’ moments longer than the standard metalcore/deathcore band in the same way that God Forbid do, but unfortunately cannot help but pander to the clichés of a tired, repetitive genre, and as a consequence are overrun by them. Harking back to a time when people were only beginning to work out what to do with the then-new phenomenon known as “metalcore”, this album was probably one of the last ones to provoke anything close to interest from the metal community before the whole genre imploded in on itself.
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