Fighting fresh Undrask unveil their first album into the annals of history. Hellbent on battling through the drudgery of wanky solos and spacious build ups with clinical adhesion to a secret melo-death serum and through its highs and lows the heat coils within the Undrask element when dealing with the power cosmic. Battle Through Time is an authentic title for what the forty-eight minutes and fifty-eight seconds amount to.
Battle Through Time is an album that you can put on, walk out on to make a cup of tea, take the washing in, run for a leak, clip you toe nails and then come back to and feel as though you haven’t missed a single lick. It’s uneventful and generic riffs, while impassioned and definitely classy, tend towards hitting the same hoop. Which is great in a game of basketball but when you’re shooting to third base you want to reign on the pitch.
While Undrask push competitive riffing on their freshers fare the technical prowess is for the most part empty and superficial. As the songs are arranged around the incoherent wail of the lead guitar swinging in and out of range the rest of the ensemble is shadowed by its lead, which apart from decomposing the rhythms doesn’t actually do much in the way of innovating the pieces and instead sprints around like a manic cat playing charades with your vocabulary.
If you ever wanted a musical representation of too much of a good thing then heed no further. With the high register being hit more than pornhub at christmas time the lead begins to take off from the rest of the ensemble leaving you wondering if it was a bird, a plane, or just a secret Nazi experiment from the dark side of the Antarctic. Clearly neither but its placement in the mix speaks more than the actual singer who other than providing a staccato syncopation is drowned in the mid-range while channeling the narrative and warring it like a forced duet.
As memories are like a jigsaw so too is Battle Through Time. As each piece is placed it leaves you wondering if ‘that should have went there’ where the interplay between the instruments sound as though their formation was made by using a pair of dice and a Myfarog character sheet.
6/10
