Published: October 17, 2013

The first release by the american band Nethermost is Alpha EP, which is melodic death metal with slight droning elements of doom metal. As a whole it feels like it is still searching for itself and is unfortunately unable to keep the listeners interest up for it’s full running time.

In a way I really do like these laconic kind of moaning guitar melodies, which are quite biting in their own catchy way. Though there is slight little problem with them, and that is that they do sound song after song a bit too alike. At best these moaning guitars could be very effective elements with the music, but now with them being too much alike and repeated they just feel like that horniest tomcat of the hood, the one that just moans all night. After a while it just becomes too tiresome and irritating. If you would listen to this record in shuffle with no specific order you probably could not recognize these songs from each other.

Concerning the sounds this EP is a bit weak too, the guitars sounds pretty okay to me, but the bass could have been a lot more crisper.The drums are pretty sad, flapping noises to listen, too. The actual playing is nothing to be complained about, but the sounds were just too clean and tidy, so it was some kind of rawness that Alpha is really missing. The vocals are pretty basic death metal-like groaning, without going to do raw and incomprehensible form though, but they could have used some more variation too.

In the end it is pretty hard to actually like this EP, but at the same time it really does have some elements that I really enjoyed. For example those monotonic, yet gashing guitars. What it comes to compositions the songs just shoot themselves to knee with being too alike, and the weak soundscapes escalate the effect.