Murmur – Murmur

January 17, 2014 • Underground Activists

Another attempt to find good black metal on Bandcamp, and another failure. The ability of the average band to know whether it's black metal or not is quite disappointing. Okay, so at least in Murmur's case there are more than a few hints of the sound, but for the most part I'd just call them avant-garde (referring to the genre—bands like Unexpect or maybe Frantic Bleep), something I don't care much for, so my experience (and this review) turned out a bit differently than I'd hoped.

Now, as far as being a metal band in general is concerned, Murmur really isn't bad by any means. The technical ability is there for sure (the apparent sloppiness is a result of bizarre rhythms and often-inappropriate speed) and there are riffs aplenty—some of which are admittedly quite good, especially the softer (yet still sinister) ones like the middle of "Al-Malik".

But the songwriting loses me pretty quickly. It sounds like the band has a good idea of what metal is and what it should sound like, but can't focus on any single thing longer than thirty seconds and ultimately don't seem like they really know what they want to do. It's like they were putting together a jigsaw puzzle but put half of the pieces in the wrong places, and some of them were from a different set entirely (like, what the heck is "Recverdos" doing here?).

That being said, Murmur isn't awful. I'm not really into this sort of avant-garde metal so there simply isn't much here that is appealing to me. Maybe part of my disappointment comes from the false advertising; I can't say for sure. Hopefully someone reading this review might enjoy the album more than I did.