| CD REVIEW Thomas Giles |
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Band : Thomas Giles You know, if you've never heard about Thomas Giles before, that's no big surprise to me, as it is the artist name used by Tommy Rogers, lead singer, keyboardist, and founding member of North Carolina Progressive Metal act Between The Buried And Me. For this solo outing, which he not only recorded on his own, but on which also played every instrument and sang every note himself, he simply uses his given middle name as a monicker for the project. This album is, by the way, not his first solo outing, as he's released an album for his electronica side-project under the monicker of Giles in 2004 (on Victory). Wanna hear something funny? The label puts this down as “Heavy Metal” in the heading, then go in in the info sheet to call the album “...a challenging Rock record designed so that the parts build up to a larger, cinematic-like structure...”, claims the music explores “combinations of the outré genres of both Post-Rock and Glitch...”, and concludes to say that it draws references “...to such artists as Radiohead, Björk, the Verve, Beck, Stereolab and Spiritualized, balancing both Rock and electronic impluses...”! So...what about that? Well, actually there's only “Rock” (or metal) in the form of electric guitars in 4 out of the 11 songs [check album opener “Sleep Snake”, the second part of the ensuing “Reverb Island” (which opens acoustically, by the way), the Post-Rock/ Alternative Metal anthem “Hamilton Anxiety Scale”, and the scorching “Medic” (constituting the only reference to BTBAM)], to begin with! There's also one Electro-Industrial song in “Mr. Bird”, and that's the only other song in which relatively aggressive vocals are being handled. On the 7 other songs, Rogers blends acoustic guitar (or hardly distorted electric guitar) with piano (a lot of that), organ, keyboards, and nice synthesizer sounds, in a variety of intensities...but overall in a rather calm mode. Drums vary from non-existent to “normal”, to tribal, and electronic. He also uses his voice in a very clean fashion, and as he backs himself up vocally, there's a nice degree of harmonizing in the end result. Regrettably, when you'll search on the internet for sites with music off the album, you'll find only that album opener (full-length version) at (www.) myspace.com/thomasgilesmusic, and only samples to 4 other songs (plus a video to “Sleep Shake”) at (www.) last.fm/music/Thomas+Giles. For samples of the rest of the album songs, you might always check whether it's got a page at one of the trusted online sales websites like Amazon, iTunes, Napster, etc... Meanwhile, I've been having a ball with this album! I've always been into the mingling of heavy guitars and electronics first, but what Rogers does in his more acoustic guitar driven songs is simply delectable...and not in the first place thanks to his great vocals! I mean, there's some great songwriting backing each and every song, you know! And everything combines to make me put Pulse in my “Best Albums Of 2011” lists! Darn...I have really enjóyed this! 98/100 Tony. |