POLARS

Textures is a quite strange band from the Netherlands that mixes melodic death metal in the key of the Goteborg school with bands such as Dark Tranquillity with quite modern thrash metal parts reminding me of Bullet For My Valentine with calm progressive and ambient elements and a few technical parts that recall bands such as Meshuggah. This strange mix sounds very weird at first try and the vocals don't really help and sound like a mixture of In Flames, Bullet For My Valentine and Rise Against. They are quite variable but maybe too diversified and not unique enough.

The good thing about this record is that it is quite unpredictable and surprising and has many chilling interludes and atmospheric changes of style as in "Young Man" or the interlude "Effluent". The band is able to put a high amount of creative ideas in a short amount of time, for example inside the strong opener "Swandive". The band gets to the point and still varies a lot within the running time of five minutes of this song.

It's because of these talents and abilities that I don't get why the band put two overlong tracks in the end of their record. "Polars" is still a great song but it could have been shortened a lot and I would have preferred to listen to three different tracks instead of one good song that goes slightly nowhere and has no truly epic character whatsoever.

The strangest thing is though the final "Heave". It's a purely instrumental ambient track without much variation that sounds like a mixture of krautrock meets space ambient music. Take "Phallus Dei" from Amon Düül II minus the strange vocal noises and add Senmuth's "3923 Seconds On Mars" instead and you get an idea what this song is about. This sounds weird and it is indeed. It's not a bad experiment but it doesn't fit at all with the rest of the album and literally feels quite alien on here. This is what I call experimental at all costs and this also explains the variations in the reviews for this somewhat confusing debut album.

These guys clearly have a lot of talent and many diversified and still coherent songs. But they should focus on their strengths, improve the vocals and dose their experiments in a more logical way. Nevertheless, this album somewhat intrigued me and I'm ready to check their other records out soon. I somehow encourage their courage but they should not go too far. For fans of experimental melodic death metal, this is certainly worth to be checked out and maybe also for open-minded avantgarde and progressive fans. Anybody else should not try this out as this is a very particular effort with some odd elements and many strong points on the other side.

Originally published on www.metal-archives.com on December 6th of the year 2011.

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