aaamusic | On 29, Jan 2012

Funny this, I feel that for all intents and purposes I should like Caliban’s ‘I Am Nemesis’. It’s loud, it’s got riffs coming out of the proverbial, and some of it is rather good. But then again, after four tracks, I find my mind wandering, and I realise that no matter how loud I play it, or whether it’s on hi-fi or headphones, it just feels like they’re going through the motions here.

 

On the one hand, there are some great heavy German metal of high order here. ‘The Bogeyman’ is so sonically impressive it could make your speakers bleed with its lightspeed drumming and thunderous guitar onslaught and a melodramatic string section creeping in towards the end, showing all the hallmarks of Century label’s finest. Or ‘Deadly Dream’, with its almost intimidating rhythmic tightness and vocals that leap from bellowing the demonic snarl/scream with alarming precision that makes me suspect a bit of studio magic, but not so much as to dismiss the track, as it’s used with a degree of aplomb. And there’s tantalising rawness and whispers of hardcore punk verses in ‘Das R31ch’, although the Euro-chorus that creeps into the periphery feels a bit tacked on out of habit given a gripe I have with the album.

It comes to the fore on ‘Memorial’: big, theatrical and featuring a mildly mind-melting hybrid of savage percussion, guitars lifted from the devil’s cement mixer, and a perpetually-lurking pop-indebted melody that bursts into a chorus that feels oddly like a metalcore Queen tribute night, which isn’t quite as painful as that sounds. But this very aim to experiment that trips the band up, as they just don’t quite get the elements to gel. So on ‘Edge Of Black’, what we get is a band who sound like they’ve only just discovered the US metalcore formula of brutal verse/U2 chorus and don’t really know how to use it. This is a shame, because ‘No Tomorrow’ and the intense ‘Davy Jones’ both do climactic stadium-aiming metal rather well with expansive choruses and guttural, malevolent verses. But even then, the formula wears, and quite a few tracks on ‘I Am Nemesis’ don’t just follow a formula but feel like they are relying on one to prop them up.

 

I just can’t get into ‘I Am Nemesis’. It tries to straddle big-studio European metal in the true vein of Century Media’s catalogue, with weird pseudo-urban moments, like the jarring “FYI” chant on ‘Modern Warfare’, and also retain a feral rawness that just isn’t happening. Every time I think I’ve managed to immerse myself, something pulls the plug on this frustrating collection of songs that don’t really push the envelope as much as forget to write the address on it, tie it to a brick, and accidentally break next door’s garden gnome with it.

 

Katie H-Halinski