It’s hard to imagine, but try, if you will, to imagine Fear factory covering Meshuggah tracks, but lacing them with hints of Porcupine Tree when you least expect it. Got that? Right, so now you have a close idea of what The Safety Fire sound like, or at least as close as you’re likely to get without listening to their mighty fine album which is out in February.
Kicking off with a brutal statement of intent ‘sections’ the band successfully meld vocal harmonies and brutal screaming in a way that few of the metal-core acts have managed and they weld this to a brutal chassis of churning riffs that recall the aforementioned acts as well as the mighty Ocean on the Fluxion album. Make no mistake, this is complex, brutal music that has been tightly regimented by this extremely focused band so that each pumping riff is as heavy as lead and twice as crushing. The key here, the thing that truly separates this band from any number of progressive metal mentalists, are the guitars which alternate between molten floods of noise and some of the most fluid solos you’ll hear outside of a Dream Theater album. Better still the band know how and when to apply their ludicrously technical skills so that they enhance the piece rather than run away with it – if you’re unsure just check out ‘Aphasic’ which slips between solos that the devil would sell his soul for and demented, vicious metal of the first order.
However, while the guitar playing is undoubtedly impressive, it would be criminal not to mention the formidable talent of the remaining members of the band for The Safety Fire have a distressingly tight rhythm section and a vocalist who seems comfortable gliding between outright brutality and melodic passages without struggling in either area. In short, The Safety Fire are a talented bunch who are blatantly going to progress to great heights in the coming year. Amazingly for a debut EP the band have even managed to rope in a few friends including Pin (Sikth) and Martin Goulding (Linear Sphere) both of whom contribute solos to the title track.
‘Sections’, then, is a masterful release and the fact that this is a debut release is all the more astonishing as it can take some bands years and several releases to gain this sort of confidence and technical proficiency. The only slight disappointment is the fact that this is a digital-only release, which means those music nuts like myself who crave a physical product are shit out of luck. Nonetheless this is a scorching piece of work that will find a welcome home in any metal-head’s collection, particularly for those who have an interest in progressive music. On the strength of this recording it is more than obvious as to why the band have gained so many plaudits thus far and 2010 deserves to be their year.
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