Review: Intervals’ The Shape of Colour Has Fantastic Figure
Just to clear something up right off the bat, The Shape of Colour is an instrumental album. This one is unlike Intervals’ last album with Mike Semesky on vocals and exactly like their first two EPs.
The absence of vocals, then, puts the guitars front and center, and boy does Aaron Marshall do some good work. Although many bands, especially progressive ones, have some very strong guitar work, I give Intervals props for sounding progressive without making use of those overly djenty off-beat rhythms that sound like someone dropped their guitar down the stairs. The songs all flow together well and from a composition standpoint this album is lacking virtually nothing.
The Shape of Colour sounds to me like it could double for the soundtrack of a Sonic the Hedgehog game. Compared to most metal, its tone is very upbeat and warm, so much so that you could slap almost any track of this album over any level of Sonic Adventure 2 and it would fit perfectly; it’s not hard to picture the blue speed demon rocking out to The Shape of Colour when he’s not busy wrecking any of Dr. Eggman’s seemingly useless robots.
The album’s standout track is “I’m Awake” but each song has a hook, such as the stop/start chugging riff in “Sure Shot” and the djenty “Cliffs of Dover” style riff in “Meridian.” Even though this album is a bit short at only eight songs, they’re all very good ones; it seems like Intervals just cut the bullshit and decided not to include any filler tracks just for the sake of making the album longer. Aside from the brief length, the only other flaw here is that parts of riffs feel a bit copy/pasted across a few different songs, such as “Sure Shot” and “Libra” having very similar stop/go patterns. Both tracks are catchy, but it’s hard to look past hearing the same series of notes in different songs. These flaws, however, are minor and they shouldn’t stop you from checking this album out — overall, it’s fantastic.
The Shape of Colour is out now. Listen to it here.
