ECLECTIKA - review added 8th June 2010
Album Review: Dazzling Dawn (2010)
For fans of: Death Metal(++)... and tonnes of other stuff too
Eclectika is an interesting fusion project from France. The band is based around the talents of Sébastien Regnier. He (along with Aurélien Pers and Alexandra Lemone) performed vocals, he played the instruments, composed the music, did the artwork and engineered the release. There isn't a lot he didn't do to be honest.
Dazzling Dawn follows The Last Blue Bird (2007), and the band's demo Funeral Victorious March (2005). Eclectika has been around since 2001.
The sound is dark and experimental, fusing self-indulgent instrumental passages with extreme death metal, doom, and even some folk. The result is a mixture of the sublimely excellent and the distractingly terrible. The overriding feel is of an impressive but uninteresting album. This is not something I would want to sit down and listen to, although parts of it would make breathtaking background music in a film or Final-Fantasy-style video.
As a purely instrumental band Eclectika could be superb, but the mixture of that and the death metal is a step too far and leaves Dazzling Dawn in no-man's-land. The female vocals in the metal sections really aren't great, and the continuity leaves a lot to be desired. There's definitely some talent here, but for me it's lacking direction at present.
Check out... some of the instrumental sections. They really are cool...but definitely not rock.
Track List:
01. The End
02. Dazzling Dawn
03. Sophist Revenge
04. Les Démons Obsédants Du Regret
05. There Is No Daylight In The Darkest Paradise
06. Experience 835
07. The Next Blue Exoplanet
08. Marble Altar
09. Stokholm Syndrome
10. 11 Corps Décharnés
Label: Asylum Ruins Records
Artist's website(s): Eclectika | MySpace | Facebook
