Mitchell Mantell – This Is Your Opportunity [EP]

 Very little on this EP makes any sense, musically or stylistically… I get experimenting with sounds and trying to come up with something unique, and innovative, and new, but this is way too experimental for its own sake. I don’t understand the need for growls and screams when the music is not aggressive enough to support them, just for the sake of heavy music (“In the Wind”) or guitar lines that seem so random and disparate they don’t have any direction nor do they give the music any sense of melody whatsoever (“Reflections” and “This is your opportunity”). The only thing that makes any type of sense is the way the atmospheric intro “Lost” carries into “In the Wind” but once the growls come in, it’s all down here from there. Don’t get me wrong, the vocals are pretty good (especially the clean parts), it’s the instrumental that doesn’t seem connected to anything, it just randomly happens. Here’s the deal, music in general has to have a sense and melody and rhythm to drive the songs forward and make it pleasing to the ear, that’s why extreme metal bands like Behemoth, Arch Enemy or Cradle of Filth are doing so well on the metal scene, but since those key elements are kind of missing on this EP, the music is just not that appealing. True enough there are moments when sounds click and are melodic, but these moments are to sparse, and the overall impression is that everything is disconnected.