Band: The Way of Purity (Unknown: Sweden?) Album: Crosscore (2010) Genre: Hardcore, darkened and with some Industrial I’ve got a peculiar one here. A band called The Way of Purity: no names, no nationality – though Encyclopaedia Metallum says they’re Swedish and so does the extension of their e-mail addres; yahoo.se – no faces, but balaclavas instead. And not only that, but also military clothing and boots, making them look like a paramilitary militant brigade of some kind. I hope they won’t somehow retaliate for my positively constructive – at least that’s how I intended it – criticism on their debut release Crosscore. By Niek

They have a message too: something with animals, an ultraviolet dimension and Satan and God being one dude. A bit beyond me to be honest. Like a band of vegetarian Satanist Christians living under the hole in the ozone layer. But they’re not wearing sunglasses. Must not match with the balaclavas or something. It’s all a bit strange. Mysterious even.

Musically though, they make a lot more sense. Crosscore features ten tracks that don’t know what to be exactly, but they still manage to be something “alright” – I’ll get back to why it’s just “alright” later. Kind of like crossover cars: not your dream cars, but you still wouldn’t mind driving one for a while.

The album starts as rather hateful, slightly psychedelic, fairly Hellish industrial hardcore. The first three tracks sound somewhat uncontrolled and undistinguished, as if they’re missing a vital ingredient, the glue to hold it all together. It isn’t until the fourth track that the missing ingredient falls in and you finally figure out what was lacking all along: clean female vocals. A number of the tracks on Crosscore feature an incredible female voice. Her singing is refreshing, her talking – she does that too in some tracks – is just sexy. Despite that she’s probably Swedish, she sounds a bit like Monica Bellucci speaking English.

Oh, she didn’t speak much in that, did she? Well still sexy though!

The band also pulls in some darker elements, perhaps a bit of gothic or black metal, but it stays primarily hardcore. It may take you a few spins to get through to the music – I’m on my sixth or seventh spin now – but after that… it doesn’t get really interesting. In fact, apart from the tracks that get help from the Swedish Monica Bellucci, it gets kinda boring.

The main reason for this are the fairly minimalistic guitar riffs, of which there aren’t even many. And there are no leads either. It’s mainly just simple chord progressions and such. I found out why that is too: the album was completely written by the bass player. With that in mind, the way the guitars sound all of a sudden makes a lot of sense: it’s like a bass player on guitar.

This then is something the band should really work on before they’ll be able to really get through to me. Their very own, aggressive, evil, sometimes mechanic style, tempered by purifying female vocals are an excellent start – I really do appreciate this – and it’s a real shame it isn’t met with an equal amount of originality in the riffs department.

My Grade: 6.5/10
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Tags: dark, hardcore, industrial

This entry was posted on Friday, September 3rd, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.