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Mirrors of Obsidian – From One Form – Album Review

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Source // Mirrors Of Obsidian

From One Form is the second release from Dublin brothers Ciarán and Eoin Ennis – under the name Mirrors of Obsidian – and Eoin’s arsenal of riffs, a mix of sterile, downtuned djent riffs and thrashy, borderline melodic death riffs combined with Ciarán’s harsh bellowing makes for an album packed with content….but unfortunately, one that isn’t necessarily memorable.

Perhaps best described as a mix of Meshuggah and early Gojira with a dash of melodic death metal tendencies sprinkled in, this is an interesting combination, making for some intricately constructed guitarwork. Nearly every song has at least one damn fine riff that will worm its way into your head (prime example: the melodic tremolo passage on standout track “Blood and Chrome” that’s immediately followed up by a sluggish Mushroomhead-esque nu-metal variation. It works!). This interesting surgical combination of riffing styles makes From One Form worth listening to for guitar-oriented metalheads, but whole songs just don’t seem to come together as well as they could and great riffs get lost in a sea of ideas developed to varying extents. Frankly, after the first few songs, you have a firm idea of what the remainder of the album will sound like. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but by the end, From One Form becomes predictably stale.

A memorable chorus or brief ambient outro serves to mix things up a bit, and the nine-minute title track features a clean intro and a handful of tempo changes and style shifts, but it’s almost too much. Some ideas feel left unfinished while others would have been better left off. The ghost of early Gojira appears again as Ciarán Ennis sounds almost exactly like Joe Duplantier from around the time of The Link. He injects a few clean-sung lines on a couple of tracks, but they don’t add a whole lot the sound of the album, meaning the vocals become monotonous.

Riff junkies would be advised to check this one out for the sheer creativity displayed at times. Overall though, while further listens might bring better definition to some of the ideas involved here, From One Form has a bit too much going on for its own good. 5/10

https://mirrorsofobsidian.bandcamp.com/

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