| CD REVIEW Many Things Untold |
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Band : Many Things Untold This British five-piece band from the county of Cambridgeshire may have been operating since 4 years already, yet their average age is still only a staggeringly young 17! Staggering...because that fact is something you would NOT guess from listening to the highly professional music they write and make. Taking influence from the American New Wave Of Metal and Metalcore sounds, the band blends Emo, Screamo and elements from Death Metal into a whole which may not be very original (because being done already by so many others, and not only of US extraction), but is executed with a proficiency which makes one take notice when considering the band members' young age. Now, I have no idea (info lacking) what the boys achieved before coming under the attention of Rising Records, who sent the lads (singer Toby Underhill, guitarists Gary Hillman and Adam Wilkinson (the first also bringing in the second voice), bassist Ash Robinson, and drummer Tim Wright) off to the Red House Farm studio in November of last year to record this album under the productional guidance of recording engineer Mark Daghorn. Just to give things a little more spice, the recordings were then sent to Thin Ice Studios so Karl Groom could do the final mixing. The ten tracks (with a duration of just under 39 minutes) all display the fact that the musicians have listened to their musical examples quite intently, and then set about emulating the playing styles to perfection...meaning you get nicely intertwined guitars with a somewhat Progressive basis playing their slightly complex melodies in a quite up-tempo pace (with however the necessary breakdowns and pace changes), but also the drummer sounds like a seasoned veteran (listen to that footwork, those nicely placed machinegun-like but always melodic snares) and the bassist is of the same high quality. In fact, if you didn't know better, you'd think the rhythm section'sbeen playing together for a couple of decades. On top of it all, you'll find the singers going into three styles, which are unvariable used in each song: the lead singer is the most versatile, with a somewhat aggressive Screamo-styled voice, a quite clean one, and even some very deep Death grunts...while the second singer is only clean. Meaning that occasionally the guys change from a contrasting vocal styling to a harmonizing one. Obviously, the album having been released in the UK in July, it's been getting some reviews in from the press, all of which were rather positive (4 K's in Kerrang!, 4/5 points in Big Cheese Magazine, 7/10 in Metal Hammer). And with the album now also being distributed (starting Aug. 22, apparently) in Europe thanks to a deal the label struck with Germany's SPV, I'm sure more of those positive reviews will be coming in forthwith. For a sampling of the band's music, surf to myspace.com/mtumusic, where you'll find abundant proof of these boys' prolific abilities (demo versions of two of the album tracks, plus 3 complete versions and a sample of a 4th finished album track...the sample track can also been seen in a video, which also links you to the posibility to see one of the posted tracks as a video again)! As Emo/ Screamo goes, I have to say that overall I've grown fed up with the genre a couple of years ago, but with bands like MTU, who dó add a little something, I've grown a new taste for the genre. Not that the genre will suddenly become my next rave (it never did in the first place), but I sure didn't mind...at all...listening to the album...over and over again...in preparation for the review (in fact, I've given it more spins in the cd-player than I usually would've, thanks to the fact that I had a couple of shores to do inside the house...the perfect background for a heavy-duty job, I tells ya!). 86/100 Tony. |