In White - Heredity (2014)

I dug this one up from the grave, because there is next to no coverage on these Turkish melodic death metallers. In fact, when I googled the band's name and album title, I found all these bullshit news articles that had absolutely nothing to do with the band. It was showing me articles about “white heredity” in all actuality, which is certainly not what I was trying to ascertain information about.

So why doesn't anyone give a shit about these guys? Beats me, as they're pretty decent. Heredity is their debut album, released just a few years ago on a label called M2K Productions. Listeners are going to get a familiar dose of early In Flames/Dark Tranquillity style melodic death metal, but they're also getting a lot of crunchy grooves, perhaps something out of Chimaira or Heaven Shall Burn's playbook, which certainly isn't a problem for me. Problem is, we have another case of the vocals being raised too high in the mix, which can work to drown out the two guitarists in the band. There's also some downtune mixed in here and there, which can somewhat give off a bluesy nature to the material. The solo pieces are pretty decent though, but the songs themselves are pretty short with the longest cut (The Pier) being about five minutes. Most of these tracks are about three or four minutes long and seem kind of stripped down. In White are the kind of melodic death act that fans of groove metal would enjoy, which almost seems like an oxymoron.

Though there are clean backing vocals, these guys seem to be more interested in grit and grime, which is certainly going to drive away fans of much cleaner approaches to this genre. It's interesting to note that the band's demo was closer to alternative or modern metal, whereas this one added in more melodic death metal elements. We can hear the old sound of the band peeking in on awkward ballad “Unsaid” which at least has the right amount of passion behind it. Sure, it's not quite the most vocally tuned approach that I've ever heard and I wouldn't advise the guy to quite his day job, but you know – there's spirit behind it.

After that one, we have the acoustic “Colors” which sounds a little bit better. Following that, we actually get a track which originally appeared on said demo by the name of “A Scarlet Road” which shows a much different approach for the band as I mentioned. It's not bad – still out of key a bit, but there's at least a sense of emotion behind it. They tried, you know? That's really all I can say.

(11 Tracks, 41:00)

6/10