EDEMA: Default

Released: 2009

Edema is a heavy band from Italy, a country whose metal scene, rather like that of France, seems to be burgeoning but not well appreciated outside the county itself beyond obvious participants like Lacuna Coil and Rhapsody of Fire. Default is the first album from this eclectic Piacentini four piece and strikes an interesting balance between divergent styles.

This band's music has been categorised as almost everything from deathcore (which is most certainly isn't) to post-metal (which is also isn't) to nu-metal (vaguely) to progressive death metal, and even that doesn't really seem very accurate. The harsh and garbled vocals are the most significantly death metal aspect in Edema's sound, which draws from a lot of influences and makes for an interesting if somewhat contrived listen, as no two songs are much alike. It's as if the band has made every conceivable effort to make every song they do as stylistically different to the one before.

"Crawling Unseen" begins the album with the buzzing of flies before a similarly buzzing guitar line plays out alongside a stumbling riff, then deviates through alterna-prog style slap-bass and polyrhythmic interludes with half-sung, indistinct vocals. "Generator" is a much more straight-forward death/thrash track until a quieter, jangly section two-thirds in. With "Purchasing Your Own Illness" you can see where the nu-metal reference comes from right down to the title, the heavily bass-driven plod and the Korn-style breakdown; the wandering, genre-defying "Onirical" sounds something like a cross between Meshuggah and Skinlab. Then there's "My Sweetest Whore" which is an almost structure-less, time-signature defying death metal song! It is, quite honestly, an album full of surprises, a pot-pourri of styles and influences. The slightly muddy production lets it down a little though and by dropping noodly passages with half-spoken vocals into a song like the title track in a way that Pantera and Machine Head totally wouldn't do it, it's clear that Edema is sometimes trying too hard to be progressive at the expense of truly good hooks.

Nonetheless, Default is only the band's debut album and few bands get everything right first time. They aren't afraid to mix things up and certainly have some good ideas. The vocals need work however if anyone's ever to make sense of them and they will need to tweak their songs in future to make them a little more memorable. Certainly worth a listen though.

1. Crawling Unreason
2. Generator
3. Onirical
4. Default
5. Purchasing Your Own Illness
6. My Sweetest Whore
7. Unequal Desease

Rating: 68%