Time Signature It comes back real...

Genre: groove metal

Signs Preyer is an Italian metal band who combine elements of stoner metal, sludge metal, traditional metal, hard rock and thrash metal into their own brand of groove metal. With metal acts like Adrenaline Mob, Concrete Sun and 4Bitten reviving the groove metal genre these days, you might expect Signs Preyer's Signs Preyer to be another fine addition to the corpus of releases in the world of the new and improved groove metal.

And, well, it defintiely is.

Drawing on the groove only as one out of several stylistic elements, Signs Preyer have arrived at a fairly original style of metal music, which definitely shows a lot of potential. There are things they could work further on and things that can be further developed, which is a challenge that I am sure the band will embrace with open arms, but their music definitely points in the direction of something very interesting.

Anyway, so the groove is an integral part of the music on Signs Preyer, but the band also draw on other types of metal for inspiration. Thus, we get a dark but aggressive track like 'Anger', a groovy and uptempo track like 'Bitch Witch' (which features old school guitar wah-wah guitar lick exchanges), a more nu metal oriented track like 'It Comes Back Real' (which is based on simple groovy riffage), a near-progressive melancholic track like 'Dark Soul', an aggressive power-trash track like 'Hell' and an all our hard rocker like 'Signs Preyer' on the same album.

In other words, this is a quite varied album which represents various metal and hard rock genres, wrapping them in groove and a certain edgy rock 'n' roll attitude. Some people might consider this to be a lack of focus, but I quite like the variation on this album. Moreover, through the rather consistent production (which is characterized by a lot of bottom and has a certain rawness to it), there is a sense of coherence and a red thread throughout the album.

For a debut, this is a pretty good album. It is not flawless, but that is exactly the beauty of it: there's more to work on - there's more room for development, and that is what art is all about. In any case Signs Preyer is a solid, strong debut album, on which Signs Preyer show that groove metal is not dead, and that the groove can be combined with other modes of musical expression from the world of metal into interesting and powerful metal music. There is a lot of potential on this album, and I really look forward to hearing more output from Signs Preyer in the future.

(review originally posted at seaoftranquility.org)