WRATH AND RAPTURE

Wrath And Rapture were a band that was formed out of trying to make a masterpiece album, and this sense of ambition shows in their work. Formed with Between The Buried And Me bassist Dan Briggs, their biography states that they were going to try and make an album that would shake the American metal scene, turning it over on its side. Throughout its fairly short course of half an hour, the self-titled debut shows the band pulling virtually every trick out of the book, doing all they can to impress and dazzle the listener within such a short time. Unfortunately, this formula must have looked better on paper, because it seems the album overshot its mark and came out a tad underwhelming.

Being that BTBAM bassist Dan Briggs is in this band, it did not come as a slight surprise that this band would sound like Between The Buried And Me, although the other evident style that the music is fused with definitely came as something of a curveball. Wrath And Rapture passes me as being a halfway point between progressive metalcore, and extreme power metal, particularly the epic sounds of Finland's Wintersun. For anyone that's heard either of the bands I've mentioned, fuse those two together, and you should now have a pretty good idea of what to expect on this album. Highly melodic fast sections are met with tech metal freakouts and plenty of synth ambiance to go around. Like so many extreme metal bands that decide to go down the progressive route, they are technically solid, and manage to pull off the demanding music, but I can't over the feeling that Wrath And Rapture are trying too hard here.

Everything on the LP is blown out of proportion. Wrath And Rapture shoots from several different vantages and keeps the ideas firing away, and that's all just within the course of one song. Bombastic display is something that this album is in no dearth of, although it does tend to make the album wear a little thin. Hearing the band blistering away at such a fast pace with the Tommy Rogers-soundalike growls and out-of-place power guitar solos cannot go on for long before the shock of their skills and sound wears off, and it just starts feeling overdone all around.

Wrath And Rapture is an impressive project, and I was especially surprised by their power metal aspects, which actually benefited from the over-the-top approach that the band brings to the table. Barring that, the album's try-hard vibe results in alot of flash, but not nearly enough substance to give it that masterpiece status that they were obviously aiming for.