Written by Malique - BugJet Editor
Record label: Bluesky Records (The Love Conspiracy, Inc.)
Release: 2004

A unique mixture of black/speed metal with guttural male hardcore growl and smooth female voices in melodious guitar riff is burst from Straightout, a talented sextet squad. Indulge yourself into the abyss of symphonic madness and hypnotized by the magic they spell.
 

Track list:
01 - From the Abyss of Our Compassion (Intro)
02 - Surrender with an Empty Heart
03 - Emotion than Suicide
04 - Butterfly Kisses in the Autumn Dance
05 - An Irresistible Feeling
06 - Fading Beauty
07 - Winter and Broken Angel
08 - The Place Where the Love Laid
09 - To a Woman That I Knew With Extravagant Hue
10 - Undying Beauty and the Symphony of Sadness

My first preamble with Straightout began with their performance at GoodFest 2. To me these guys show us how to play metal blend of melodic mellow and hardcore tunes in neat playability. I was impressed with their fretboard mastery performed by duet guitarists during onstage. Wasting no time, I hurried catch their latest (which is the first) CD titled Undying Beauty and the Symphony of Madness and here is what I thought about them.

Looking at elongated stunning words used as song and album title, I immediately correlate them as European mystical-blackened theme bands like cradle of filth and dimmu borgir. Dig deeper, they're presenting more than speedy riff-keyboard-growl-female voices mixtures. It's hard for me to classify which subgenre they fall considering variety of style unified into Straightout character. It's Theater of Tragedy meets Amon Amarth. The male voice offers growling hardcore-death-grind guttural grunt with melodious female voices in here and there. Keyboards used only as whispering chordal background not to be dominated the entire symphony they built. The beat changes abruptly from fast tremolo-picked strings marshall-esque distortion into magnificent acoustic arpeggios duet harmony. What an exceptional offering!

The strongest point from Straightout I noted here was how brilliant their capability in songwriting. Every part, intro, chorus, break, outro of the song seems connected each other even thought the sounds changed from raw distortion into acoustic duet and vise versa. The female voices added symphonic nuances to the whole tunes with adequate proportion. The guitar riff both guitarists played are memorable. It's not so sophisticated, but easy on the ear. Sometimes its sounds like straight metalcore riff, down-tuned low strings, in other part shows like old school iron-maiden/helloween duel, on the break and coda occasionally clean acoustics steel strings softly elude. Though the guitar solo not incorporated, the whole perception of a song Straightout played is still impressing due to their blatantly melodic riff. The song duration varies form 1 minute to more than 11 minutes with two instrumental in intro and outro chapter with good lyrics written in good English. Listening the entire chapters would not cause fatigue or getting bored; my ears have appreciated the magic they spread.

Musicianship wise, both Straightout guitarists perform uniformly fine delivering brutal, melodic, soft acoustic, and fast tremolo picked fretboard acrobatic notes. The drum beats quite uninteresting to me because the snare-kick dominates the whole beat, allowing only small portions of toms and floor toms showing their guts, but that might driven by style of choice.

Production wise, in my humble opinion, I would suggest the male growl brought ahead in the mix. It's buried so deep between the instruments as if the male voices are the background. Adding reverberant, overdub and delay to give audience bigger sound as if she sings in the cathedral of madness can process female vocal further. The acoustic parts sound great. Keyboards are adequate not excessive nor dominated the mix. Snare and bass should appear harder to bite. Kick drum is okay although it would be better if mid frequency boosted to make it more percussive. Guitar distortion is all right but might be crunchier and more in-your-face if gain level not pushed too far and overdubbing is done. Noise is virtually absent though the sound level is weak.

I hope that, in their next release, these guys will find the right people to work with in studio for tracking, mixing and mastering, who knows how metal sounds like and how to get the most out of the boards. It's too bad that this kind of masterpiece crafted in not-so-good recording quality.

To summarize, if you're looking for different kind of metal delivering hardcore, melodic, magic, symphonic, Scandinavian, acoustic merge of power/speed metal style, shipped in outstanding songwriting skill, consider Undying Beauty and The Symphony of Sadness as your next batch in your player.

Score
Musicianship: **** (4 of 5)
Songwriting: ***** (5 of 5)
Recording: *** (3 of 5)

Comments

title Written by Guest on 2004-10-21 05:42:01 the song titles don't reflect anything metal. more of a poetry

download Written by admin on 2004-10-22 03:04:31 lots of mp3 servers on the web serving straightout full album. just search into google with keyword album title bracketed with quote. example: "album title". happy downloading!

great! Written by Guest7584 on 2004-11-08 19:04:14 this band is awesome!!!

all stuff Written by smg hxc kid on 2004-11-23 06:19:49 great song greats bands .kpn maen lagi ke smg.gw tungguin,keep on hxc sxe all see ya on next pit.anak kep on sick suck it fruit

hai there....... Written by pandu (indonesia) on 2005-01-13 14:40:50 i think this band is the most powerful i listened, great! so can you send me pic from your band? thanks....... panduatarian@yahoo.com

Written by moegky on 2005-01-18 05:32:30 Best indonesian Symphony metalcore..cheers!!!!!

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