Review: Eshtadur “Mother Gray”

Eshtadur “Mother Gray”
Bleeding Music Records

In every country there’re representatives for all kinds of Metal. This is of course also about Colombia (and other ones of Latin America). The best known band coming from there is probably one of my Metal Gods – MASACRE. Other at least quite well-known Colombian ensembles present sometimes even more brutal creativity. Well, ESHTADUR isn’t one of them – in both “categories”, I think. It doesn’t mean that music of our friends from Pereira has any sign of brutality. I can recognize it from time to time, but the truth is that guys are more concentrated on creating melody. Riffs are heavy and change quite often. You’ll find several influences in them as well. Drums beats variable – there’re some changes of tempo, passages and stuff like that. Mostly this is in middle or even slow tempo, but from time to time drummer speed-ups. Then guitars’ track is also faster and vocal becomes pure Death Metal growling. But these parts are rare and in general we have with something between scream and growling to do. But it’s not all coz there’re also fragments where he sings clearly. Well, in last song he mainly does it – but this is a tribute song and this is in other stylistics than other ones on the full-length.

Well, this band is surely not for maniacs of unbridled brutality. But lovers of sweet as fuckin’ candy melodies should steer clear of this band, I guess. As I said before, music is generally melodic, there’re some solos and so on, but there’s also spirit of real Metal in that. I think I even can agree with term Death using a. o. by musicians to describe what they play. This surely isn’t classic one and surely with several influences, but…

By the way, ESHTADUR was formed in 2005 but hasn’t so many releases – ‘Mother Gray’ is their third album. They have also in their discography demo, EP and three singles. Reason of such situation isn’t laziness of musicians! It’s about often changes in line-up: list of former members is really very long.