http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73Fbp3_DjH81
With the hipster milieu try to (often unsuccessfully) imitate and or emulate whimsical and faint hearted apostasies of yesteryear’s forgotten heroes, music emitting and thus, evoking, a certain harder energy has oddly enough been quieted. Deflay, a European alternative metal band clearly has ambitions to turn up the volume, both literally and in terms of quality.
The songs present themselves as a tug of war between the lead singer’s voice and lead guitarist’s epic riffs, with the other band members also serving a role beyond simple spectators. With the aforementioned majority of today’s artists (representatives of naïvism, no doubt) frantically deviating from every justifiably established musical precedent with the intention of being as different as possible, albums and songs have boiled down to most often being mere snippets of inarticulate nonsense, dyslexia personified. Jejune. A rarity, Deflay’s songs have a beginning and an end, but are so melodic yet energy infused that we await the latter displeased.
While many of today’s self proclaimed metal bands clamber to revive this somewhat forgotten genre, they succeed only in providing an auditory transcription of what I assume a day at the junk yard would sound like – a genre I have affectionately as such dubbed “scrap metal“. Innumerable decibels of inarticulate screaming waging war against unfortunately well-armed instrumentals paradoxically leave most listeners completely unmoved. Although the era of Pantera, Nirvana, Alice in Chains and other artists that unified both the brains of technique and the brawn of voice appears to be left in the mercy of us few remaining nostalgics, Deflay is a breath of fresh air that just may breathe life back into this fatigued genre.
Check out Takes Time at the top of this page, as well as the other gems from their (as of yet) unreleased album Learn the Flames:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=5UCRbRA6kNo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9VWr4Af9VYQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=F7ojX6gBDi0
