Centiment is a new project formed by InMe members Dave McPherson, Greg McPherson and Gazz Marlow with the addition of Neil Howard and Mark Shurety to “create of a metal album that attempts to explore unknown areas of the universe of sound” of which the Pledge Music crowd funded debut album Streets Of Rage is the outcome. The result is a collision of 8 bit samples, metal core RIFF, Protest The Hero vocal melodies and electro synths….
Which will sound genius/horrific (delete as applicable) depending on your prevalent tastes. Me? I’m leaning towards the genius as there are a lot of great (and downright quirky) ideas thrown into a mix that often hit the mark but sometimes misfire spectacularly in the musical equivalent of a blunderbuss.
When they do get it right it results it some genuinely great songs such as the opening track ‘S.O.S.’ with its glorious charming 8 bit intro (I’ve been watching/playing too much Scott Pilgrim recently) leading into a crunching metal core and the afore mentioned Protest The Hero melodies in which the 8 bit elements occasionally surface in understated fashion amongst the RIFF.
On the other end of the spectrum the overt commercial nu metal/hip-hop/drum n bass combination of second track ‘Defenders Of Oasis’ is… not so good, in fact it could have been a horrible mess were it not for the strong vocal melody holding it together.
The rest of the album lurches from one extreme to the other - in the case of ‘The Kraken’ and ‘Three Laws of Neurotics’ all in the space of the same song - but when the nail it on the likes of ‘Acheron’ and ‘Viktor Frankl’ it’s rewarding.
Despite all this contrasting and sometimes conflicting ideas the entire journey is actually pretty coherent and not a disjointed mess it could have been. So top marks for effort and trying something different so I highly recommend giving Streets Of Rage a spin.
