EMP!RE - 'Glue' Album Review

Tracklist:

1. Colour Of Shame

2. Glue

3. Miss Fortune

4. My Party My Rules

5. Rewrite

6. Feasts

7. Time Ain't No Healer

8. I for 1

9. Sour Tastes

10. Teeth/Tether

The debut album from EMP!RE is a raucous blend of heavy riffing with vocals reminiscent of latter-day Geddy Lee (once his voice had mellowed from its original piercing zenith), there's a lot to love from this 5 piece's debut album. With an overall upbeat feel and plenty of excellent musicianship to admire.

Picking out a few of the songs "Colour Of Shame" opens proceedings very effectively, by building up to the huge vocals teetering on top of the crashing waves of guitar and synth in the chorus it rolls on, tumbles back to the bare bones and then rebuilds the tension again. Lead single "Sour Tastes" comes in like a bulldozer and certainly is a worthy representation of the rest of the album and puts the band's best foot forward with a catchy hook and some slamming riffs to keep your stamping along. "Teeth/Tether" closes the album nicely building some excellent crescendos of bombastically heavy sections mixed as ever with those melodic vocals.

The musical powerhouse doesn't let up much throughout the album, even in it's calmer moments it's still pretty meaty stuff and the synths don't detract from the power and brutality of the riffing here, deployed as they are to compliment the guitars perfectly playing off against them maintaining interest with countermelodies. In all, I'm very impressed with what I've heard here and if this is the shape of things to come from EMP!RE then there's certainly a good deal of promise in that.