Look, you can label your new bedroom project as 'hard rock', 'punk' or 'recession metal', and when people realise it sucks, it simply means they think the songs suck. But when bands/musicians have the balls to label themselves 'progressive', 'technical', 'avant garde', 'experimental', or 'virtuoso', expectations soar big-time like you won't fucking believe it. Not only does the audience expect good songs now, but would also want the band to prove the worthiness of said tags. When a band like Martyr says in their bio, "Their music is often seen as technical progressive death metal", they not only make sure they credit the general populace for such seemingly far-fetched pigeon-holing, but they kick ass every time they put something out anyway, and actually stretch the technical limits as individual musicians, as a collective and of death metal on the whole, and experiment with jazz scales, while still coming up with good songs at the end of the day. (One can argue that Atheist, Cynic and Pestilence only deserve the progressive tag and everyone else has just been following, and therefore not really experimenting any longer, and this is why that quote is so safely put).

So how does all that matter to a band like Bangalore's Eccentric Pendulum and its debut EP 'The Sculptor of Negative Emotions'? Because, between their pages on last.fm and myspace, these good lads have managed to use most of those scary tags to describe their music. They better be jaw-dropping level geniuses with their respective instruments for starters, right? Actually they aren't, they're all competent but not extraordinarily talented for all young kids to lug their Ibanez seven strings around and start taking lessons from them.

Not a big problem, the game is still not lost, because there's still scope for these guys to pull it off. Could this be a case of the whole being greater than the sum of all parts, with killer songwriting and arrangements? Probably, and that's what they are gunning for. The results are good when the riffs are chuggy, heavy, dissonant and aggressive (see: the first two and the closing riffs on Sepia Drown, making it the best song of the album), and not-my-cuppa when it's got those melodic/gothenburg style single-note riffs with loud cheapo synth backing, a style which I never thought deserved brutal growled vocals in the first place. The second song Cut Through the Light especially is a victim of this.

The title song takes the middle ground, also including a couple of interesting turns, namely the calm pre-chorus and the chorus with a quasi-operatic clean vocal line. The biggest peeve I have, though, are the overly midi sounding synths that seem to have been added merely as an after-thought, and given a prominent part in both the mix and the album's running time (intro on song 1, the whole of songs 3 and 5). May be the keyboardist joined a bit late? Because a lot of this is not sounding very composed and clinical like their 'regular' music is, and ends up as jarring fillers that come out of nowhere, not gelling too well with the rest of the music. This proves yet again that if musicians want to fuse two styles successfully, they really need to be good at both.

Overall, the band has tried to be different when most others of this ilk are still out shamelessly aping Death and Atheist, so it's a step in the right direction. But the bottom-line is, they've still got work to do as far as arrangements, tones and the production go. Should be interesting to see where they go from here.

(Add half a thadiyan more if you're a fan of gothenburg style bands)

Year of Release: 2009
Label: Self