The Sea Charmer – Cimmerian Repose (2012)

Presenting a very interesting musical approach, The Sea Charmer delivers their two-song ‘demo’ “Cimmerian Repose”. Mixing Progressive elements with some Hardcore and even post-rock/metal hints, these two songs are quite interesting to listen to. Hailing from the Czech Republic, this young band managed to catch our attention immediately with some witty melodic passages inserted into their more ‘modern’ Metalcore antics.

Opening with “Trigger the Grief”, the track sounds a bit Post-rock/Metal-ish from the get go, but the clear hardcore/metalcore influences quickly sink in. We particularly hate this way of half-assed ‘singing’, but sounds a bit tolerable in this song. The clean –core singing is ok, and considerably better than the ‘harsh’ screams, this also sets the mood a bit different than what one would expect. The music is quite excellent, and even the core-ish guitars seem to work well with the atmosphere. The epic closing made us get all rattled up, too bad it was just to complete this track and it wasn’t taken advantage of (we hope to hear more of this from them in the future).

“At Dusk of Vipers” shows a bigger core vibe than the first track, but again, the guitar work steals the show and if it wasn’t for the horrible singing (and the chugging stop and go), this song could pass as any other genre. The guitar solos are a very nice touch and the clean vocals are good enough to lift this song, and also make us forget about the ‘screams’. There are some elements here that remind us of a Metalcore version of Meshuggah, there are also plenty of weird instrumental passages that nicely change the pace of things.

Extremely short and sweet, this release shows potential from The Sea Charmer. The band has great skills and a very unique sound, but the core elements are what bring this effort a bit down for us. While core-crap is hot these days, we feel that the band has more potential than just having screaming over their very well crafted music. We will surely keep an eye out for this band since it features redeeming qualities, and even for a core band, it managed to keep our attention for quite a long time.

Release: 2012

Country: Czech Republic