Little Repetition, Zero Soul
I'll say this right away: For me, Skullgrid is the disappointment of the year. After hearing Behold... The Arctopus's first two EPs I had high hopes for their debut full length and this fell far, far below them.
(Instrumental) tech metal is a lot like professional ping-pong. Things happen at a bafflingly high speed; for the observer it's hard to tell what is going on, and trying to tell what's going on tires your brain out pretty quickly. Also those playing it, and those into watching it, seem to take it far more seriously than an outside observer would think a game of ping-pong would deserve. I'd guess it seems to them to be geeky and esoteric. With song titles inspired by a table top RPG, one band member who plays a 12 string beast of an instrument designed for two handed finger tapping (it's called a Warr guitar), and two other guys with enough chops to keep up with him, Behold... The Arctopus certainly live up to the "geeky" stereotype of tech metal. But rather than being a competitive game of ping-pong with a championship at stake, they are a friendly game where beer is drunk in between matches and paddles are laughingly thrown by the loser at the winner. This simile might be stupid, as I'm not sure professional ping-pong even exists, but my point is that this instrumental trio has an energy and playful exuberance that made their displays of complex musicianship all that much more fun to listen to.
Or at least they were fun on their first two EPs. Skullgrid sees the band growing up, out of their playful early years and into much more cerebral, complex musical territory. Disappointingly, in doing this they trimmed away the energy and fun that made them unique and enjoyable.
Critics of technical music like to bring up the line between soul and musicianship and put said technical music as far from the "soul" side as possible. On Behold... The Arctopus's first two EPs, I would say they straddled the line between the two marvelously and managed to combine the best of both worlds. On Skullgrid, they have wandered much too far into the "technical" side of things and forsaken soul altogether. Part of the blame rests on the album's production values. The album suffers from the main flaw of clean production, sterility, while also having a very flat and weak guitar tone. Combined with the very, very thought out music (as I mentioned in the title, there is very little repetition on here), it makes the Skullgrid experience very quickly become tedious... and it pains me to say this because I feel like this should be a 30 minute tech metal joygasm.
| Reviewer: Jeff Mcquiggan Added: November 29th 2007 |
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