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Tasters

Reckless 'Till The End

Written by: PP on 03/11/2011 05:05:31

"Reckless 'Till The End" is a great example of how important the right kind of production is to the success or failure of an album. If the mixing is horrid, muddy, or unclear, no amount of great songwriting and trend-hugging is going to rescue the album from being an unpleasant listen. It's a bit of an oddity to meet an album this badly produced from Nuclear Blast, whose bands usually enjoy big buck production no matter the style, but "Reckless 'Till The End" by Italy's Tasters is one album they should look forward to putting behind them soon.

Lets start with the mixing. When one-chord breakdowns, which there are many of on this album, nearly cause sound breakage from their lower-range distortion even with a good pair of headphones, something is going terribly wrong. You can tell that the band are going for that modern metal-type production that we've seen with bands like Dead By April, Sonic Syndicate and others who take as heavy advantage of dramatic synths and electronic effects as these guys do, but it hasn't been achieved to an acceptable degree. The harsh growling also suffers from the lack of clarity, leaving them sounding monotonous and generic as the album progresses along. Then add on top of that an overall finish which leaves the distortion sounding borderline industrial, and you're definitely in a wrong place for an album which utilizes catchy clean choruses to achieve that synth metalcore effect that's so 'in' these days. It's a shame, because underneath the mess of a production you'll find infectious choruses, such as on "Katherine's Got A Secret" and "Sleeping With Spirits", but here too the clean vocals sound like someone forgot to attend the knobs while they were being recorded.

The consequence is an underwhelming and average release, whose high points are dragged down significantly and low points exposed bare when they arrive. Strong songwriting saves the first half of the disc, but as we progress beyond track six, the music becomes boring and almost unbearable to listen to. When the parallels between a more metallic version of Dead By April start manifesting during the heavily electronics-backed clean choruses, one is left shaking his head and wondering how much of a better release this could have been had the production not ruined their chances.

Download: Katherine's Got A Secret, Sleeping With Spirits
For the fans of: As We Fight with dramatic electronics, a heavy version of Dead By April
Listen: Myspace

Release date 16.09.2011
Nuclear Blast

Tasters - Please Destroy This World