Red Tide

Themes of the Cosmic Consciousness

Review by Miika Kuusinen

Red Tide is an american band that has gained a cult status thanks to the Internet. For years they have been advertising their band and demos in newsgroups and it took me years to hear their music. To my knowledge, the band was supposed to put out a new demo but decided to release songs on a self-financed album instead, which was a wise decision indeed.

Perhaps my expectations were grown too high over the years, but Red Tide turned out to be a slight disappointment. The music is complex and has many influences from aggressive thrash/death to more melodic progressive metal - similar to Cynic in that regard which is a huge influence on these guys. The musicianship is good but the flat production combined with relatively poor vocals drains much of the energy from Red Tide. The clean male vocals are quite immature and powerless while the growly vocals are generic and soulless, partially ruining the music. There are lots of well arranged, interesting, melodic (somewhat ”jazzy”) guitarwork here and there but the aggressive parts are unfortunately rather generic, boring and ill fitting.

This band shows promise... If only the band would manage to get a good vocalist and compose more original thrashing parts.

E-mail: RTideMGT@aol.com

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