Customer Reviews

Irradiant

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was blown away by this album. If you like technicality this is really good stuff. Meshuggah is my favorite band, so naturally I took to this group. The artwork is sick too. Listen to the title track "Irradiant". Flippin' amazing. Do yourself a favor and pick it up.

Some of my favorite drum work of Dirk's is with this band and this album of theirs, in particular, is absolutely my favorite. I hate it that their singer left to sing for Mnemic, because he's got some really great and unique vocal ideas that are delivered really well on this album. The album's opener is the perfect opener and actually one of my favorite songs on the album. There's a pinch of polymetric technique on this album but nowhere near enough to make the Meshuggah comparison as many seem to do.

Nothing on this album is impossibly complex but that's a great thing for a band within the genre. There's just a lot of solid, groovin' music on this album. Having said that, there are also a fair number of melodic passages scattered throughout the album that serve well to break the monotony all too common when listening to an album in this genre from cover-to-cover. Every musician shines on this album.

In my opinion, this is Scarve's best work to date. Production is great, musicianship is great, and its replay value is incredibly high. I've listened to this album NUMEROUS times and still find myself wanting to constantly revisit it. That's the sign of a true winner in my book.

Scarve are basically a somewhat simplified, more groove-oriented version of the industrial-death supergroup ZYKLON with a heavy pinch of Meshuggah (check out "Asphyxiate") which is somewhat forgivable in this case as it is stringmaster Fred Thordendal himself who handles the guitars on the track. Ultimately the band never achieves the intensity of Zyklon or the mathematical complexity of Meshuggah but grinds away with enough genuine recklesness and natural flow that they are sure to please at least fans of the aforementioned bands.