As Flaming Wrekage’s brutal fourth album tickles your earholes, you know this is something special. …
8
Math Metal Blasts
From young Swedish quintet Letters From The Colony comes brash array of death metal, shoegaze and melodic manipulation–their debut album Vignette is a feast of delicious musicianship. If you’re hypnotised by the albums opener and think this will be an ambient and cool release, then fools! Fools, you all!
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Letters From The Colony practically vomit their math metal beats, a pogo stick of electric melodies bouncing across the speakers. Galax morphs from a vicious spike of noise into an almost ambient twist of itself, a true display of the potential dichotomies of metal–at just over eight minutes long the album’s opener doesn’t begin the journey, it is a journey.
Letters From The Colony course through a nine-track release only to establish themselves as capable chameleons of metal.
With that in mind it’s worth pointing out that the rest of the tracks on Vignette sound as though they should be on a standalone release. Tracks like Erasing Contrast and The Final Warning feel like they fell off the edge of a good sound and neither work with nor match the prolonged sounds established in Galaxy. Letters From The Colony make promises in noise they can’t follow through with, trying to incorporate many elements from many places—but one thing they do promise is compromise.
Letters From The Colony compromise in their creativity–they play around with balance, levels and modes of production, manipulating their ideas to brush against every inch of possibility in the genre, and that’s what makes it all so appealing. This Creature Will Haunt Us Forever is a lilting interjection of ambience, Terminus makes for an unapologetic and grizzly statement and ultimately, Letters From The Colony course through a nine-track release only to establish themselves as capable chameleons of metal.
STAND OUT TRACKS: Galax, This Creature Will Haunt Us Forever, Vignette
STICK THIS NEXT TO: Meshuggah, Gojira, Opeth
