Demo

I received that demo from a Heavy Metal band from from Greece. I take this opportunity to thank them for sending me their demo CD. Their demo CD contains 5 songs. For a demo I must say that I was impressed by the quality of the sound, pretty clear and extremely powerful. The riffs are killers and stay engraved in your mind forever. The guitar solos are also quite nice, technical and melodic in the same time. The overall sounds like very aggressive Heavy Metal, lurking to the borders of Thrash Metal like in the first song Merciless Attack. Well, let's get one thing clear, the song itself is really cool, but the vocals are really really weak, and I mean weak. It's too bad cause the band for sure have talent and their songwriting is interesting. The added Black Metal back vocals in Merciless Attack are really awful and demonstrate how big the vocal needs to be improved. In the second song : Mind's Cell is very interesting, more straight and square Power Metal in your face with better vocals than the one displayed in the first song. This is the best song of the demo without any doubts, with it's excellent riffs and better vocal parts. The third song, starts once again with a nice guitar "entrance", once again the riffs are square and powerful, but the vocals are really difficult to bear sometimes. On this song, I'd say that the song is the perfect demonstration of when production (and producers) are needed. You can see that the song is interesting and if you don't pay attention to the errors you can imagine what the song could be. And that's the thing with Celestial Ode, they could be so much more than what this demo displays. The 4th song The Loser is the calm song of the demo, and the demo finishes on a fast paced song that suffers the same weaknesses as the others. So I know I'm a bit hard with this review, but I believe that a band has a lot to gain by a founded criticism review than a "this band is nothing special" or "this band sucks" like some people would write when they don't like something in an album or a demo or the band itself. I'm an artist too and I prefer when people criticize my drawings in details instead of getting "wow, you rock" or "this isn't much my style" or anything not constructive. One of my best friend will know what I'm talking about here, and I take the opportunity to thank him once more for all the in-depth reviews he does of my drawings, although it's sometimes hard to hear some stuff, it helps me a lot to evolve and improve myself. There is talent in this band, I have no doubts about it, but they need direction (producer) and they need to improve dramatically (I mean it !) on vocals if they want to attract attention upon themselves, because let's face it, the concurrence these days is huge, and you need to have most of the aces in your game to get out with a winning hand. I wish Celestial Ode the best future and hope they will be able to overcome their weaknesses and become a great Heavy Metal band, they sure have the potential.