COLD COLOURS - Cold Colours

I never know quite what to think of one man bands. From my experience, they tend to suffer from one guy writing and approving everything and not having anyone else around to run their ideas by.

It started off well: a short, energetic acoustic intro followed followed by a distinctly black metal riff (I hesitate to call it a song because it's 88-seconds long), and then into the main meat of the album. The high points in this album evoke Daylight Dies' very American approach to death doom, coupled with Agalloch's black metal by way of neofolk and a tiny bit of Dissection and newer Absu's thrash and clean vocals. So far so good, right?

Unfortunately, the low points just sound like a self indulgent mess of various metal influences that Cold Colours mastermind Brian James Huebner threw together because he thought it would sound good. Sometimes it works quite well, but a lot of the time just it doesn't. Combine this with the fact that the album is front-loaded with the good songwriting and the last half of the album is a directionless jumble, this could have made a great EP, and some internet exclusive songs for die-hard fans only instead of one full length album that starts going downhill halfway though. The album ends with an unnecessary cover of a Rotting Christ song the band apparently took their name from, which probably would have been better suited as a for fans only sort of thing.

Ultimately, questionable parts aside, there is definitely a lot of potential here. The first half of the album really is varied and enjoyable music that never quite falls into one category. However, until Mr Huebner gets familiar with self editing, the diamonds are going to continue being obscured through a big pile of rocks. [Sleaszy Rider]
- Tony Howard

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