Cubical Sphere
Promo 2007
5.7
Ermmmm….ok. Cubical Sphere is apparently courting the “progressive death metal” tag with a heavily jazz-infused, fairly unaggressive demo outing that tries its hardest to conjure memories of Cynic and Atheist and doesn’t exactly succeed, both in imitation and on its own terms.
Like so many bands that attempt a highly diversified sound, the problems that Cubical Sphere encounter on this demo are mostly tied to how these elements are written together. The clean spacey guitar and technical rhythm work sound great at times, but they’re overplayed; if this is supposed to at least have death metal influence, I expect more aggression. Instead, songs like “Kordax” and the way overlong “Mahatma (jhala-madhya)” spend too much time meandering in clean jazzy territory while failing to establish a real direction. Annoyingly, I’m convinced that this band is capable of writing interesting heavy material, as shown by the catchy polyrhythms in “Spiral Integration” and parts of “Recuerdos.” This Greek outfit possesses some ear-catching instrumental flair as well, but the songs just come off as kind of aimless and the awkward shouts of the vocalist aren’t going to win any awards either.
This promo has its moments, but Cubical Sphere have a long way to go if they want to make an impact on the progressive metal scene. Honing in more on the “metal” aspect of their sound would definitely help them out in this regard. And by they way, whoever thought it would be cute to open “Mambo Leon,” the disc’s entirely clean, ridiculous mambo jazz song with that annoying “…and now for something completely different” sample should spend his next couple of days reading and studying the world’s various definitions of “pretentious.” Actually, the whole band might want to do the same.
