Chuck Schuldiner Project

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Northsong

Northsong is (to my knowledge) a one man band formed by Cortland Runyon. The synths are kind of neat, I think replacing the synths with another guitar track would have sounded better, but nothing is really detracted from the sound. Guitar riffs are fast ish sounding, but they sound to be the same note repeated over and over, just with a rhythm. There are moments where things get broken up, but not with the kind of fast paced soloing or riffs I'd expect from an artist in the genre, but slow, "held" notes, with plenty of space in between. Winter's dominion is a bit better, using synths to get a sense of variety in the guitar riffs, and some *actual* variety, but it still seems to be mostly slow riffs with the occassional rhythm centric riff; unfortunately, its a very boring song, and the synths get a bit annoying at times. It captures the viking feel, but it doesn't sound exciting or lively, just "meh". The drums are programmed well, and they do a good job of keeping the tempo while remaining fairly interesting about it. But, there are also vocals, I don't know what he did to them, but they sound distorted and a bit obnoxious, being way too high in the mix for this genre. More broadly, the vocals just sound over-processed and really sibilant. My gripes with the vocals set aside, this album was a bit below average, not really living up to the genre's expectations, and the vocals really drove that in.
5.75/10
http://www.reverbnation.com/northsong

No comments:

Post a Comment