Nemesis Alpha – Eternal Machines

Band: Nemesis Alpha
Title: Eternal Machines
Label: Sliptrick Records
Release date: 13 September 2019
Country: USA
Format reviewed: Digital Promo

It appears as if my fellow writers at the Zine have labeled me a melodic death metal person. Well, they aren´t wrong, and thankfully keep pointing me in the direction of that genre almost each week as of late. This week a bomb was dropped on me in the form of NEMESIS ALPHA and the very recently released album “Eternal Machines”. The 14 track full length album is the second in line to the self-titled debut album from 2017, and even for the amount of tracks, the album still only counts for a little over an hour. And the intrigue-ness of mine wasn’t diminished by the vocals of Björn Strid.

This sort of melodic death metal is different from what I usually hear. I guess I have grown somewhat accustomed to the “mainstream” way of that genre so a certain change was welcome. The opening track “Buried Under” has a rather spacious soundscape, or so to speak. Screaming vocals mixed with clean, the bass is obvious and the feel of cluttered atmosphere is missing and sort of left me thinking this was on the brink of djent. Surely the path of this band would become cleared the further the album went on.

“Havoc” brings on a strange synthesized intro followed by some techy playing. Surely this would have been more likeable for me if this was present throughout the entire song. The chorus sounds very Soilwork inspired, an inspiration that seemed to be present further on in “Soul Deceiver”.

The next three tracks had a very clean snare drum that beat its way into my brain. But even so there was quite the diversity in riffs and vocals. The choruses were as catchy as ever and at no point did I feel like the sound had simply started all over from track one to go another round. The diversity went even further with “Burning Blue” as it brought on an unexpected strutty synth pattern prompting me to label this track as a ballad.

“The Cleansing” does not really like a turn in such a sense; however I did become anxious to hear more of the previous music. What has been on so far is very well written, the skill of writing catchy songs with good choruses and such has become obvious, however what was here were mere complicated riffs stacked on top of each other. Some more space could have been further explored.

The name of “Chaos Defined” speaks for itself. Which brought me to the last track of the album, “Bloodline”, which I can´t help but feel should have been placed way higher up on the record as it served as an Epi-Pen for the seizure that has been going on.

All in all, it was a well performed album. The intrigue-ness I had at the start had not disappeared by the end of it which in itself is a big compliment from me. The highlights of it all were surely the vocals, although the diversity follows closely in second place. 7.5/10 Julia

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