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Nightrage's "Wearing a Marytr's Crown" is boring and unremarkable
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The CD's cover is more interesting than the music.
These days it seems as though you can’t swing a dead cat around without hitting a melodic death metal band. The genre is swollen and ungainly, and still musicians bring themselves before its altar with the intent of feeding the beast. And with the legions of metalcore bands taking cues from melodic death metal, the already common “melodeath” sound seems to be positively ubiquitous.
Nightrage’s new CD, “Wearing a Martyr’s Crown” serves only to swell the melodeath ranks. In fairness to the band, though, melodeath has been done for well over a decade, and the population density of the genre is similar to that of a sardine can. That makes things tough.
One of the problems “Wearing a Martyr’s Crown” has is the production. Most noticeably, the vocals are very high in the mix, which gives the album a distinct American metalcore sound. In addition to being too loud, they are also generic. With almost no death metal growls, vocalist Antony Hämäläinen (ex-Burn Your Halo) sounds like every other metalcore vocalist. That does nothing to help Nightrage rise above the fray, and it hurts the album overall.
The guitars, too, are overproduced. There’s nothing wrong with an even, crisp guitar tone, but there is something wrong with the plastic slickness of the guitars on this CD. It makes the songs sound like DragonForce trying to break into the genre. And whenever you do something the way DragonForce does, it means you have failed. This is particularly true for the beginning of “Among Wolves” and especially “Collisions of Fate.” It sounds like guitarists Marios Iliopoulos (ex-Exhumation) and Olof Mörck (ex-Dragonland) are focusing more on “being awesome” and less on playing interesting, well-crafted riffs. That sort of conduct is strictly for Guitar Hero bands. The solos are all that way, too.
Nightrage also falls into the “acoustic guitar section” trap. Switching between heavy and quiet sections has become predictable. Such texture change-ups require more than simply busting out the acoustic guitar and playing minor 9th arpeggios to be interesting. Quiet sections have no intrinsic merit, and most bands don’t realize it. “Collision of Fate” and “A Grim Struggle” especially make use of acoustic guitars. Both have a strong Latin influence, but they are spoiled by the absolutely out-of-control vibrato employed by the lead guitarist. It works fine on an electric, but on an acoustic it sounds significantly less rad and more ridiculous.
The bass and drums on the CD are both passable, but on an album where everything else is either mundane or bad, passable performances end up doing more damage. Bassist Anders Hammer and drummer Johan Nunez (Suicide of Demons) are like two people watching a mugging in progress and doing nothing. They aren’t making matters worse, but someone’s still getting beaten and robbed.
The songwriting on “Wearing a Martyr’s Crown” is middling at best. Without memorable melodies, harmonies, rhythms, heaviness, or vocals, the album just plods along as another melodic death metal release. None of the above criticisms, however, apply to the CD’s title track, which has what every other song lacks, and is an example of what good melodic death metal could be. It has interesting introduction, catchy but smart chorus and solid solos. Even the acoustic section of the song is decent, and similar to something off of Iced Earth’s “Dark Saga” CD. Unexpected, yes, but it works.
Overall, Nightrage’s “Wearing a Martyr’s Crown” probably makes a decent tool for getting newcomers into melodic death metal, but for fans of the genre in general, there’s no real reason to listen to it. If you happen to be somewhere doing something else, though, and it's on because someone else is playing it, it wouldn’t hurt too much to listen for a few minutes.
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