Rockfreaks.net

Kayser

Frame The World...Hang It On The Wall

Written by: PP on 10/11/2006 12:34:19

The image that the opening track of Kayser's sophomore album "Frame The World...Hang It On The World" depicts is falsifying. "The Cake" assaults you with its angry, riff oriented guitars that mix Megadeth and Soilwork together with an extra Swedish feel established through their producer Göran Finnberg (In Flames, At The Gates). The rapid velocity of the lead guitar leaves no one cold and is easily the best song on the album. Imagine pre listening to this on the store, and then buying the album based on the misconception that the rest of the album will be thrash metal sounding like this one too. Maybe it's not meant as a clever marketing trick as such but it certainly looks like so, because the rest of the songs fail to reach the same level of intensity and guitar speed "The Cake" implies.

What starts as a thrash metal album quickly turns into a stoner rock / hard rock album even if "Lost In The Mud" still has a few thrashy riffs. "Evolution" is about as generic of a hard rock track as you can find with its mandatory scratched macho man vocals, power chord based riffs and atmospheric, memorable choruses, and is merely a shadow of what "The Cake" promised us on the opening track. "Absence"'s introduction could be straight off a Soundgarden/Alice In Chains album and is the instrumental opposite of "The Cake": it's slow, it's near acoustic and quiet, and it plays with quiet/loud dynamics more obviously than any other band I've witnessed in the past. You'll have the silent vocals in the verse, then an instrumental "breakdown" with a few heavy riffs, a return to a silent verse, a bridge with clean vocals and acoustic riffs, before we return to the atmospheric stuff once again. Repeat.

It's not before track six "Turn To Grey" the intensity returns anywhere near the opening track, but even here, the speed and technicality of the guitars in the intro and solo are insulted by the generic-as-fuck chorus that a band like Smile Empty Soul would put on their records.

"Frame The World...Hang It On The Wall" isn't a bad album as such, though, because many of the hard rock tracks are better than those for example Nickelback has been putting out in the recent years. It's merely a victim of badly thought out track arrangement. Perhaps the band thought it'd be a great idea to get the cd going with an asskicker of a song, but instead the listener is left with a false promise of intensity to come. When the listener is expecting high-speed thrash metal, he is given generic hard rock spiced up with some solos here and there, it will hardly be swallowed by a metal fan. As for hard rock, there are more innovative and characteristic bands out there.

Download: Everlasting, The Cake
For the fans of: Seether, Breaking Benjamin
Listen: Myspace

Releae date 16.10.2006
Scarlet Records
Provided by Target ApS