Wasted Struggle – Guillotines
Wasted Struggle has released their EP Guillotines with an actual guillotine spray painted on the CD. I just wanted to throw that out there, because it’s kind of cool I think. They hail from beautiful Budapest and play music that has almost nothing to do with beautiful and sunny with their dark, metallic sound.
To list some influences of this band, we’d have to name Rise & Fall, Converge and The Secret. Breeding a darkened hardcore band in the veign of Night Hag or Heartless. When the album takes of with ‘Force Me To Align’ an intense black metal riff rips up the place with hyperfast guitarplaying like you’d expect on a Mayhem record, blasting past you and then switching to that hardcore/metalcore parts on speed. Even though it’s sheer intensity, the effect seems calculated and well made. Interest will be immediately prodded as if it was with a cattle prodder.
As inspirations the band themselves list the likes of Emperor and Marduk. With the last I totally have to agree, the brutality of the music really reminds one of their work. That hectic sound is detectable in ‘…Of the last day’, where it’s hard to find the order in the chaotic music. Wasted Struggle gets down to a bit more metalcore on ‘Behold The Lights’, which has some breathing space at it’s end, when the whining guitars slowly ebb away into ‘Disgraceful’.
Almost haunting and foreboding like dark clouds gathering, the song opens up before blasting out a torrent of icy hail. Blastbeats are pumped out of the drumkit while the guitarwork actually brings some atmosphere to the sound. ‘The Shield’ is a lot like an instant black metal classic, the guitar parts will blow you away. Powerful and unrelenting the music surges onward.
When I get to ‘Wounded Servant’ I feel spent, tired and not prepared for the sonic storm that’s unleashed by Wasted Struggle on this song, which is almost six minutes long (the rest ranges between two or three minutes). Heavy coated in layers of distorted guitar, this song actually has some clean vocals and demonstrates how good this band actually is. You have to like this style, but if you do, this band will blow you away.
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