IScream Never Ground - Runners High (Review)

And again band IScream Never Ground is releasing a album. Such regularity deserves respect. However, such regularity can also cause concern.

My Rating: 73/100     Best song: Endless Relay

Most often, a large amount of work is performed due to its cheap level. And when you remember that pop patterns are also used in their music, the desire to listen further decreases. Here you can again hear melodic death metal / metalcore with a lot of synthesizer, but now pop music influence has increased even more. Many tend to see this as a negative color and this can be understood. However, it's not so simple.

Composer's work is good. Composer decided to play on contrasts: on the one side - pop patterns with a synthesizer and a high voice, on the other side - extreme vocal techniques, low guitar tuning (Drop C) and very, very, very heavy riffs. However, the advantages don't end here. Vocal and instrumental parts are interestingly composed: they are not complicated, but are structured so that the listener never gets bored. Another evidence in favor of the high professionalism of composer. The only inconvenient moment: in 2 tracks, structures of instrumental parts are too simple. It seems that composer no longer had any ideas, but the work plan had to be carried out. Interestingly, this song is located after on 2nd position after powerful introduction - listener will be still impressed by this moment.

Vocalists also do their jobs well. There are quite interesting structures of vocal parts that are not repeated in the next song. These structures are hard to hear from the first time and this is a nice detail. Here you can hear three voices - 2 male (with a different range) and 1 female, and, for a female voice, the parts are small. Some interesting ideas should also be noted. For example, the abundance of reverb after changing the composition in 1 track.

Instrumental parts can hardly be called complex. But the patterns are structured so that it looks interesting. There are very simple patterns here - I understood how it's played while listening. However, here you can see a large number of different shapes, which are also not repeated. This is all I can say about the instrumental parts, since the limit of 5000 characters does not allow describing everything in detail.

Still, I was right - this project has changed. Yes, change is not always a sign of development. But if we compare it with another cow group (for example, we take the Nocturnal Bloodlust), then here we can really see a development. But I doubt that initially there was just such an idea, which can be seen in this release. I don't presume to say that they were just lucky - band has too much talent to be able to state this unequivocally. And nevertheless, I am tormented by doubts because of how the vocals from previous releases will be performed - project format has changed a bit. Well, we'll see it later. In the meantime, I can say that the work is good.