### Contrast The Water: Perseverance

#### 04/07/12 || Averatu

This album was recommended by an acquaintance. It took me a while to give it a chance. To me, the name “Contrast the Water” would be used by another screamo break down band who spend too much time doing their hair and cramming their fat asses into ball crushing tight jeans, not enough time playing guitar, hence I did avoid with extreme prejudice. Lose points for mismatched name.

But, once I did give it a go I found to my surprise this South African outfit are in fact not half bad. The best way to describe their style is Death Metal with a lot of groove in the style somewhere between Decapitated and Blood Red Throne. This counts in their favour, as its my metal flavour of choice. Vocally its straight up old school growl and bark with the occasional screech and lyrics about war and maggots.

I appreciate the absence of fret wanking, the emphasis seems to be writing songs, they don’t seem to force together a collection of random technical or brootal chord structures to support double tap triple sweep super technical guitar solos. There are good guitar solos, but its not of the incessant noodling, look-at-me-masturbating variation.

For a self released album the production is pretty good, however it does sound somewhat hollow when following another album on my playlist. Good metal musicians in this corner of the world are like good power metal bands, which are non existent, and this by far the tightest sounding metal album I’ve come across on the Dark Continent. It must have been pure blind luck they stumbled across each other in the dark. I wish this drummer would play for my band, at times I’m wondering how much cheating went on in that studio. As with most metal albums, the bass is mixed really low.

I do get confused with this album though; besides the opening track, “Beware Be Warned”, there are three other songs that start off like opening tracks, giving the album a bit of a disjointed feel and disrupting the flow as it feels like the album is starting anew. I also find the decidedly unrelenting tempo makes all the songs seem quite similar.

The groovy parts make for spastic gyrations of the neck and torso, the driving parts drive like a rhinoceros on meth. They’ve not reinvented death metal, but they certainly do it very well.

- Information
- Released: 2011
- Label: Self-released
- Website: Contrast The Water Facebook
- Band
- Barry Drewett: vocals
- Allen Brink: guitars
- Aaron Saunders: guitars
- Chase Drewett: bass
- Colin Jones: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Beware be warned
- 02. Soldiers lament
- 03. Suffocated by maggots
- 04. Death mirrors mine eyes
- 05. Washing the spears
- 06. Death holds its toll
- 07. Defile
- 08. Interlude
- 09. My pride is all I have
- 10. Fallen