Show Your Face
Afraid

The band with that name written above was born in 2007 and they released their first album in 2011 and will release a new album in 2013 but until then we have this EP called Afraid to satisfy our potential thirst for Show Your Face music. The EP is a trio of songs that plays for around fifteen and a half minute which is a good EP playing time as it allow it to be played twice in a row easily. The cover art looks fairly alright and one would imagine that this quartet of greeks has done well in their endeavours to make good music.

That is until the press text, the short press text, is read and I notice that it contains the same silly sales pitch as for any mediocre band being released today. A hard working band with fresh ideas that has received encouraging reviews for their early works, maybe it is time for a reality check for all these bands saying so in their sales pitches. Internet reviewers are generally quite bad and do not listen enough to music they review which is why they don’t have a good picture of what they are reviewing and most of them overrate everything as you can clearly see when looking at average ratings on their sites so good reviews can be found for any record no matter how bad it is and it is not a sales argument and it is certainly not a thing to try and convince a serious music reviewer with. Sure, Show Your Face might be that exception that confirms the rule, well lets find out if they are.

Their music is in the genre that is generally called groove metal, meaning it is thrash metal with a groovier sense and also with a slight hint in the metalcorish direction making you think of a gang of french bands that it can be compared with. But really, where are those fresh ideas? They are nowhere to be found in this trio of songs, and as that wasn’t enough they also have a production that does not really show for anything, least of all their face. Just a sterile, dreary overproduced kind of sound taking away the life and the inherent catchiness in the genre. I also feel when listening to this that their only musical idea is that they want to sound like Gojira, an endeavour they fail quite miserably.

No, this is not fresh, but sure they are probably hard working as I am sure every band in the world who wants to do something is, and they probably feel like they have fresh ideas and they have found good reviews on the web which is also possible for any band. They don’t however impress this reviewer who found some good reviews which were 8/10 on sites that doesn’t rate many albums below that score which would indicate that when translating away for the internet factor they think that this is a quite ordinary EP, I would even call it mediocre as there is nothing in it that catches my attention.

Sure maybe an album can show a completely different vision of this band but somehow I doubt that it will, I am quite sure that these guys would need a real rethink of what they are doing before they will become interesting. So, if you are looking for groove metal, France is still the way to go as this Greek challenger fails quite miserably.

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