Broken Empire got in touch to ask us to review their Parasite EP and I jumped at the chance. We always promise we’ll do our best to cover the smaller, independent acts on this site and I feel we’ve dropped the ball a little on this recently. What way to get back into things than listening to four quality tracks of hard rock?
A few words from the band first:
Parasite is the maturest record so far for Broken Empire. Introducing some key themes that haven’t been touched on in our first two records and ones that will appear more going forward, there are also some pop elements, major hard-hitting riffs and some softer melodic elements.
The title track (“Parasite”) tackles the effects of depression and the feeling of having no one around that can understand, and that day by day you can feel like you have to lie about how you are whilst it’s slowly eating away at you.
As they’ve pointed out, Parasite contains a mixture of styles and this is the EP’s main selling point. If you only have four songs to sell your EP (and indeed your band), then you want to show your range, not reel off the same song four times.
The title track is pretty heavy and makes good use of growled, harsh and clean vocals with a really down-tuned sound. The chorus is still pretty catchy and there are some neat riffs in there. “Halls of Power” favours the clean vocals a bit more, while “Defcon 1” is a complete sidestep. Far more vocally-led than the first two songs, it swoops and soars rather than grinds and pummels. Closer “Time is Running Out” is comparatively upbeat and fairly flies through. Despite standing out as being very different from the preceding tracks, it’s still very much “Broken Empire” and my favourite of the quartet on offer.
Broken Empire are a band we’ve encountered before, but as far as I can tell we’ve not given them any coverage. I’m glad we’ve had the chance to fix that!
Parasite is out on November 22nd
Broken Empire: official | facebook | twitter | instagram | soundcloud | youtube
Riffs are good but the singer sounds shite