Eclectika: Lure of Ephemeral Beauty
Here’s a lack of consistency if there ever was one. Imagine a book put together without any paper or glue and it would be before you here. Lure of Ephemeral Beauty opens with a pretty awesome keyboard romp, kind of like the Diablo II soundtrack with more military. By the way it stomps and crushes skulls, your body is ready for total devastation. The keyboards sweep in, you see the sun rising over the mountains, calling you into battle, the swords are drawn, the metal clangs, hot breath fills the cold air and then, and then… And then it sounds like all of the B-side releases Cradle of Filth did when they were thirteen they never made public and will take with them into the grave. Eclectika have a strange thing going on here, a mix of Gothic metal with keyboard experimentation. What’s strange about that, you ask? Well, what’s strange is that the metal part of it doesn’t work a single bit, but when they move away from melodramatic chording somehow they’ve got a good thing going, though sadly it’s only one of the members responsible for that part. So it’s a bad, bad type of strange. This is probably the first time we’ve encountered a release where we wholeheartedly beg the band to stop playing metal and focus on instrumentals from now on, no guitars, no bass, no drums, no vocals, just those keyboards. How does that happen exactly?
It’s not certain we’ll ever find the answer, but we’ll try, just in an effort to make this look like a work of journalism instead of a tweet. The fact is simple, Eclectika just isn’t very good at metal, nope. Gothic metal is naturally melodramatic, but it creates a dangerously fine line between beauty and ugliness. One step into the ugly and your entire family for generations to come looks like it was hit by a truck. Eclectika have been struck by many trucks, too many to count, so many their brains seem to play the same 4/4 patterns with chords so overfiltered you’d swear they were simply dangling and crunching tinfoil in front of a microphone. The bass seems to take cigarette breaks from song to song. Sometimes you’ll hear it, other times you remind the guy the mixer is still recording. The vocals, my my my. On the one hard, harsh, typical shrieking through some other sort of condiment cover, perhaps plasti-wrap, and on the other clean, female vocals that are the worst kind of average. The kind that’s neither blah nor yah, but right in the middle, where you don’t care about it at all. It’s better to be hated or loved than forgotten, it’s a type of purgatory all vocalists should dread. Girl can barely hold notes properly and almost cracks the glass several times, just managing to avoid it, somehow. Plus, it’s an absolutely terrible combination with the screeching. Just not thought-out at all, which is odd because all the music is written by one guy. How can one’s own brain be absent from the writing of music which you yourself conceive? Amazing.
Sadly, basically 2/3 of the tracks on Lure of Ephemeral Beauty are of this quality, boring. Sadlier (intentional, clever wording on our part) is that this is like their third album, and it appears as though little progress has been made since their inception around 2005. That’s seven years of pain right there and they pack it all into this release. “Pack it in” seems to be their forte, because almost none of this album makes any sense, except for one little detail. Strangely, though most of it is garbage, Eclectika somehow have managed to write some pretty interesting ambient pieces, at least on the songs that only include keyboards and forego the rest. The start of “Sophist’s Legacy” or the whole of “Trauma 835” are surprisingly interesting. Nothing spectacular, but planned in a lucid way, nonetheless. Problem is it’s very little of the whole, and it can do nothing to save it from oblivion. Dude running all of the music for this band should just kick out the vocalists, including the girl, sorry, toss all his instruments other than his keyboards into the trash, and write whatever he has in his head for those moments. The rest of it is nothing close to Gothic metal, it barely has any grounding to begin and is a stain in the history of any genre.
Written by Stanley Stepanic
Eclectika: Lure of Ephemeral Beauty
Asylum Ruins
2 / 5
