isaw
Reviewed by Dorothy Pawlowski
Published: 24 February 2010
demo: self titled
The first thing I noticed when I unpacked Isaw's self-titled 3 track debut CD was the snap on the back cover of five "strapping young lads" posing before a no-nonsense industrial background and looking serious. The same style of picture is repeated inside the CD booklet and this, coupled with the close-focus eye graphic and saw-blade title font on the front cover, led me to suspect that I would not be reviewing a string quartet. Which is a good thing really: if you’re flipping through the CD rack looking for metal, you would definitely stop and look twice at this one.
“Serious” is a word that applies to more than the cover art on this CD. A perusal of the text indicates that Isaw take itself seriously as a band and extend this to their appreciation of the talents of other artists also. They list their musical tastes as extending from rock via various metal sub-genres through to death metal and this is borne out by the music.
The CD opens with “Fire”, 5 minutes plus of solid 4/4 fast-paced chugging metal featuring impressively aggressive vocals, interspersed with breaks into contrasting 6/8 melodic sections where the vocals change to an altogether more lyrical style. I’ve heard this done before in this type of music and the effect is often diluted by the singer’s inability to work well across techniques, however Isaw manage to carry off the trick. I liked the way that one of the two (panned) guitars drops out occasionally and leaves the other alone in the left channel. It’s refreshing that someone has remembered that stereo offers us the option of spreading the music around in our binaural perception. “Fire” climaxes with a half-time coda which polishes it off nicely I think, and leads us into the super-saturated guitar opening of Track 2, “Let Me Breathe.
Similar in overall flavour to “Fire”, with contrasting lyrical and heavy sections, “Let Me Breathe” makes a feature of tight vocal harmonies and some under-mixed growled vocals to good effect. The instrumental performances throughout this demo are faultless and this track is the first that really displays the lead guitarist’s undoubted skills. “Let Me Breathe” winds itself into the finish with some really manic chugging, screaming and double-kicking and, although I found the production of the double-kick was perhaps a little unsubtle for my tastes, the song finished before it had time to really irritate me.
The finale, “Tear Me Up” offers an acoustic-guitar introduction which bursts into a powerful track featuring antiphonal vocals and some clever rhythmical variations. Of the three tracks, this last was definitely the most fun for me and I think that using it to finish was a sound tactic.
As with the musical performance and apart from my drum quibbles as above, the production on this demo is crisp and flawless which is a characteristic borne out by other CDs I’ve heard emanating from this studio. Since Isaw appear to be doing a bit of live work, I can only hope that they will have enough material to grace us with a full-length release in the near future.
