Lord Dahthar - The Tower
Lord Dahthar started out as a side project by Dahthar when he was the keyboard player for a now-defunct band called Vision of Mara. So, quite naturally, this band has a very keyboard-centric sound. In fact, a third of this EP is just straight keyboard playing without any other instruments. Though the first and last songs aren’t specifically denoted as intro and outro tracks, that’s essentially what they are. They’re probably the most adventurous and interesting parts of this release because for the most part, anything with guitars and drums isn’t very exciting. The riffing is pretty basic, sporting a very “single chord played over and over again with occasional changeups” style. All of the intricate stuff is handled by the keyboards, though most of the time, you can’t hear them because the treble-heavy guitars and the light switch drums drown them out. I was a bit surprised by this, mostly because I expected a band fronted by a keyboard player to sound a lot like Dimmu Borgir. This might have been a better EP had Dahthar and company pushed the keyboards out in front, because there’s no faster way to annoy me than to make me listen to light switch drums and bass-free guitars. The tones on the guitars and drums were pretty bad. It was so annoying that this review almost turned into a rant about how Dahthar should have made this a keyboard-only project. It took me several listens (rather painful ones, at that) before I could get past the production issues. If the next release by Lord Dahthar has better production (turn the bass up on the guitars, get a better drum tone and bump the keyboards up so that they don’t get drowned out by the other instruments), I’ll probably appreciate their music more. The sound here really brought it down for me. Though the keyboard-only tracks were good, the other ones just didn’t have the same quality. These guys still have some growing to do, but production issues aside, the music on The Tower shows a lot of promise. Their next release will be the one that’ll tell us whether Lord Dahthar is worth following or not. If they can get a good studio engineer and put together a package that showcases their skills, they could be serious contenders.
(0) Comment(s)
Page 1 of 1 pages