Beats: The Elijah – I Loved I Hated I Destroyed I Created review

The Elijah are a 5 piece progressive metal band from Shropshire in England. I’d not heard of them before this album came through my door so I was unsure what to find.

What did I find?

The album starts off with an eerie synthesised atmosphere in the song In Misery along with some light drumming. This builds up into a nice orchestral background and some slow, progressive death metal vocals. It’s amazing that such vocals can carry such atmosphere. The song dies down into just the synths and drums with some clean vocals which are really nice but a tad sombre before building up with more heaviness and death metal vocals. This switching between clean and death metal vocals and sometimes even duets that work really well continues throughout the song and really works with the atmosphere in the background.

The second track, I Loved starts off with pianos and a strum of guitar with similar drumming to the first track along with clean vocals. I can’t help but think he sounds so sad. Maybe it’s a good thing, it’s full of emotion. The wrong emotion though. This guy could easily sing in a more upbeat manner but he may as well be singing Engelbert Humperdinck’s Eurovision entry. The music in this track is pretty much exactly the same as the first, there doesn’t seem to be any variation.

Now this is more like it, In Fear starts off incredibly brutal yet orchestral. This is what I wanted. Just a little change. Death metal vocals start it off before the clean singing kicks in. The issue is that I don’t like the clean vocals on this track; as they fade out he kind of croaks and it almost sounds like air escaping from a dinghy. The guitars on this track are way more noticeable which is definitely a good thing but again with the drums, they’re the same in every track so far.

The rest of the album is exactly the same all of the way through bar a couple of instrumental tracks and don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad thing but I have a big issue with bands who have less variation than a plate full of plain cocktail sausages; granted, they’re really fucking good cocktail sausages but I really think that The Elijah could do a lot more with the incredible musical and vocal talent they have.

I do really fucking love this album though; it’s beautiful yet brutal and I think it would sound even better on vinyl (please release it on vinyl).

If you like heavy yet beautifully orchestral music, you will love this. Even if you’re not into death metal style vocals I think you could enjoy this album purely for the music – if you’re doing something while listening to it, you barely notice the vocals which can be a really nice thing. You can just choose to switch them off.

The Elijah – I Loved I Hated I Destroyed I Created is out on Monday 2^nd July on Small Town Records.

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Nate

http://www.twitter.com/NateDawg27