Cheva
Nameless EP
5.5
Nine out of ten times when writing a review, I try to simultaneously listen to whatever I’m reviewing as I type and just let the words flow as they come to me. This EP from Cheva is four songs long, and I had to turn it off halfway through the second tune just to get this paragraph started after many listens due to the distraction. Thankfully it’s very short.
Nameless treads that dreaded bass guitar & drums driven nu-metal path for the first three ready-for-the-radio tracks, and then confusingly shifts abruptly to second tier KsE styled thrash on closer “End Time Catalyst”. The first problem comes with opener “Nameless” and the mid-ranged vocals that barely hold any sort of melody, and sound closer to a whine than anything else. From there everything gets screamy and a little heavy, but is entirely overdone, even going so far as to throw in a small repeated breakdown we’ve heard dozens of times before, which is probably the most interesting part of the tune. The radio metal plainness of “Still I Stay” continues the bass…vocal…drums pattern, going from soft and steady to throwing in momentary bursts of colorless guitar and filler background riffs. You know the drill.
“Muzzled” is a little riffier than the previous two tunes, but those riffs are remedial in nature and sound like leftovers from any number of well-known Sevendust/Incubus type clone bands. When “End Time Catalyst” finally comes charging through, suddenly it sounds like a severely pissed-off John Bush steps in on vocals for a few measures, signaling the point that actually captured my attention in a significant way for the first time. It’s too bad the music underneath, even at a more uptempo pace than at any other point, is as dull and pattern-made as you can possibly get, losing steam quickly. Not poorly executed, but geez it’s really boring.
I’m sorry this is such an awfully uneventful and poopy review, but nobody here will be entertained by a creative bashing of Cheva just for the sake of having amusing reading material to trudge through. It’s not really necessary, and the band takes their music seriously so it’s not like this is just Sunday afternoon playtime for them. In fact, this entire EP is available for free on their MySpace page, so if you can find some sort of excellence among these four tunes that I’m entirely missing, please do feel free to admonish me. But over here, I can’t hear a goddamned thing that we haven’t already heard performed by better bands in this dead-end style of soundtrack metal, and their heavier attempts fall short of being anything original, or even somewhat memorable. My apologies Cheva, I doubt our paths will cross again, but best of luck to you.
