Listening to Sylosis‘ albums has been a perpetual struggle against disappointment. Their brand of riffing Thrashy Melodic Death Metal has always reached for something greater than they seem capable of pulling off, thus always seeming to promise great things to come – only next time around. Progressive tendencies already started to creep in with sophomore album Edge of the World. But the complicated song structures never seemed to make a case for themselves, stretching their five albums from 50 minutes to well past the hour mark. Bluntly put, their main problem is that the songs, despite having plenty of riffs and beatdown moments, often start sounding alike because of having no clear song structures. They also have an over-reliance on a handful of riffs to drive their songs. This could be mistaken for a trademark sound but really sounds more like a songwriting crutch to me. Before you start thinking that I am deriding their work, there is always a killer track or two to be found on their albums. As a whole, however, the only album that has stuck with me as an outlier has been Dormant Heart. Sylosis‘ biggest strength has always been the creatively melodic leads that often show up from nowhere, and on this one album the songwriting danced to their tune instead of leading solely with riffs, riffs and more riffs. This is the direction I want them to take the band in and refine.
Enter the ominously titled A Sign of Things to Come, where I get what I want and more than I bargained for. The Metalcore was always present in Sylosis‘ concoction of genres but it always tilted more towards the older Hardcore leaning bands. Opening song “Deadwood” is like an autostereogram of small amounts of Dyscarnate stomp and shouted Slipknot vocals that gradually come into focus in a Linkin Park refrain. The album is defined by those latter two bands, introducing more traditional song structures and fundamentally changing how Sylosis comes across into something much more normal than they were. There are still some good ideas in the lead guitars and some songs combine a few elements in clever ways. “Descent”, for instance, does the most of the Thrash Metal drums, Melodic Metalcore refrain and wailing Heavy Metal solo. There is generally more variety as to how songs are constructed within a much shorter 43 minute runtime and this is a win for Sylosis. However, a lot of the refrains feel stuck in 90s and 00s Melodic Metalcore, cheaply diminishing the impact of the songwriting. At its worst, A Sign of Things to Come crosses ground like modern day In Flames (“Thorns”), Evanescence vocal melodies (“A Godless Throne”), whispered Linkin Park builds (“Absent”) and straight Slipknot songs (“Eye For an Eye”). Sylosis have taken a step in the right direction, only they stepped in a pile of Nu Metal and Melodic Metalcore CDs. I find myself uncharacteristically wishing for a sign of things as they have beeen.
