GHOST BRIGADE’S GUIDED BY FIRE: A PLEASANT END OF YEAR SURPRISE
Metal Review’s bit on Ghost Brigade’s Guided by Fire was enough to prompt my interest, and now that I’ve given the album a listen, I gotta say, it’s pretty solid. Theoretically, I guess you’d classify this music as “melodic death metal,” but it’s considerable slower paced and, dare I say, more soothing than most bands that fall under that category. There’s a lot of clean singing, but none of it is in the metalcore-crooning category, and while the screamed vocals sound a LOT like former Mushroomhead co-vocalist J. Mann, don’t let that scare you – there’s not a trace of nu-metal here.
Like I said before, the operative word with Ghost Brigade is actually “soothing” – like an actual ghost brigade, the music seems to pass right through you, evaporating even as you listen to it. That’s the good news and the bad news: the music is more memorable than most, but perhaps not as memorable as it needs to be.
-AR
