| CD REVIEW I Am Colossus |
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Band : I Am Colossus Following his tenures with Torn (no info found) and Blood Of The Enemy (played a Metal-Hardcore-Grindcore hybrid and split shortly after the departure of their second guitarist in early 2007), guitarist Chris Hatton, reportedly inspired by “the finest works of Black Sabbath, Nausea, My Dying Bride…and true Doom”, took an almost tunnel vision goal to form the heaviest, filthiest, and scariest live band. Heavy in that equasion not being the Napalm Death kinda chugging Grinding Death Metal heavy, but rather the slower kinda heavy, the pounding Heavy Doom kinda heavy, the kind referred to as Sludge! The 4 musicians he gathered around himself (of which only singer Karl Lane remained) worked hard in their Birmingham based rehearsal studio to get their first songs ready, and soon enough the band was garnering a very nice reputation playing support slots for such acts as Galhammer, Benediction, Suicide Watch, and Hellbastard, before headlining at reputable venues in their hometown and at the 2007 Doomsday Fest (where they played a 70-minute set that saw them used a Gregorian chant intro, wearing cloaks, using smoke machines, and even performing a smoldering drum solo). November 2007 saw the release of a 7-inch single (which was almost instantly sold-out) with the tracks “Monolithic” and “Revelations” through Meltdown Records. During Summer 2008 the band undertook a full-blown UK tour, which was proven to be quite successful as well! Having recorded the material for their debut album in August 2008 at Birmingham’s HellFire studios, the guys spent the rest of the year mixing it and perfecting it, well into 2009. As mentioned above, only Lane and Hatton remain of the original line-up. But the album’s recordings were still done by original second guitarist Carl Nash and bassist Mike Williams (the first was to be replaced later by Col Trend, and when hé left, Hatton opted for an even more effective one-guitar onslaught; the second was replaced by Tone Chen), with new man Jay Thompson on the drum stool. Well, the Gregorian chant intro being mentioned already above, that’s exactly how they start up the album with the short (1:26) opening track “Exordium” towards the end of that track, the heavy guitar kicks in to make a seemless entering into actual album opening track Monolithic. Slow Sludge being the name of the game here, you can imagine Lane’s vocals to be of the grunted kind most of the time, rather than the screamed type one sometimes finds in bands of the more up-tempo type of Sludge. One exception to that rule comes with the largely acoustic “…In Ruins (Vobis Daniel)” (the shortest song on the album barring the intro with only a total length of just over 5 minutes, an etheric electric guitar starts accompanying the acoustic one only at 3:15, the guitars put in the heavier mode for the last ½ minute “outro), where the vocals are whispered in a quite normal voice. Two of the 7 tracks have a length exceeding the 10-minute barrier (“In The Name Of The Father” is even just over 16 minutes), and this evidently helps to make the album a 57 ½ minute scorcher! On the band’s official website myspace.com/iamcolossus, you will nót find any of the album’s tracks posted, but with “Revelations” and the as yet unreleased “Grapes Of Wrath”, you get a perfect picture of what this band is about! Great stuff, and I Am Colossus is more than worthy to be featured in my year-lists! 98/100 Tony. |