Albums

Album Review: One-Way Mirror

[Album: One Way Mirror]
[Label: Metal Blade]

Formed in 2005, One-Way Mirror isn’t just any old metal supergroup. The band members come from Mnemic, Soilwork, Lyzanxia, Scarve, Warrell Dane, Phaze I, Lyzanxia, Watcha - that’s a hell of a list of metal sub-genres (thrash, black, death, industrial, gothic, etc.) to choose from and it was immediately apparent that something very special could be occurring.

They originally hired out a studio for two weeks with the intention of just seeing how things would develop. Everything just clicked into place and by the end they had a full album of songs written up. That then took them to Sweden to record the drums with Daniel Bergstrand (Meshuggah, In Flames), then on to Lyzanxia’s Dome Studio and vocalist Guillaume Bideau’s Dogs In The House Studio where Bideau and guitarist Daniel Potvin shared the production. The final mixing and mastering was done in Denmark by Tue Madsen (Sick Of It All, Dark Tranquility) at the Antfarm Studio. Now it’s release date is here and it’s time to clear a path for it because it… is… big.

The band describes their sound as “powerful and melodic hard-hitting” but that’s just scratching the surface. Opening track, ‘Destination Device’, blends warping guitar into drum kicks and snare that sound like they’ve been hewn out of the Earth’s core. They are walloping great swathes of thunder over which rumbles the steady wall of noise created by the strings. Bideau’s mighty vocal bleeds emotive, echoing stabs that flow delectably over the whole melee. ‘As You Are Now’ is a great kicker of a track that has a loosely-rapped verse with the guitars finding new levels in ear battery to complement. Several effects are employed with the vocal fuzzed out in places and the drum hacked into rapidly repeating bites. It’s industrial metal, Jim, but not as we know it.

At times the music descends into a forbidding, murky gloom with blackened chords and a vocal that cuts close to becoming a scorch mark of anger (‘ReDream’ and ‘Keeping Me Away’). Then at times it pulls it’s socks up and gets involved in some seriously clever thrash riffs or resonating vocal hooks that could see them win a slot on the airplay merry-go-round - ‘Empty Spaces’, for example, simply demands adoration with its steady verses grinding their way through to a triumphant sing-along chorus, whilst ‘21st Century’ will become nothing more important than the song you finally mosh yourself to death to.

In stark contrast, the rancid cover of Frankie Goes To Hollywood‘s ‘Relax’ is so out of keeping with the rest of the album that it can instantly be dismissed. Following this line of thinking, you’ll have to agree that this is bowel-loosening stuff when you consider just how easy One-Way Mirror have cherry-picked from genres to bring something so fundamentally sound, so intricately simple and so damned brutal in its assault. This is sonic warfare for the masses. Strap yourself in, ramp up the volume, and prepare to meet your new favourite metal band.

For fans of: Rammstein, Soilwork, Mnemic
Band link = One Way Mirror

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