dryed, the album, has a long history. Recordings were made as far back as 2009-10, with the first couple of videos being recorded in 2012. During the recording of the third video (“Ocean”), the band’s singer Panos Mademlis left the band. Sadly, some time later, he ed away. The album is finally seeing the light of day in 2022, features his vocals, and is dedicated to him.
Dryed, the band, fall loosely under the banner of groove metal, featuring as such some pounding rhythms and a mixture of harsh and clean vocals. The rhythm guitars are suitably downtuned and many bends are used in the riffs. The hard rock / metal sound overall is suitable catchy, but it’s the cleaner songs that really hit home. The harsh vocals are good, but often just don’t seem to fit so well in the mix, being just a bit too quiet. Thankfully, there are plenty of hard rocking melodic songs on the album!
“Perfect Lie” is one of those tracks, making just a little use of the harsher tones alongside the nice clean ones. It’s very much like there are two vocalists and one wonders how this would have worked live. “Saw It Coming” has some beefy riffs as well, but also a trippy sequence just over halfway through. A little “different”, and it’s moments like this that keep the album fresh.
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“Slumber Away” is another chunky number, with some nice solid drumwork and great guitar flurries. It leads into “Circle the Line” which I think I’d pick as my favourite track from the album. It’s the kind of song that just bursts with pent-up rock’n’roll, then lets it loose.
To contradict myself from early, I do have to say that “Working Machine” is a blast and is chock full of harsh vocals. The different here is that they’re wrapped up in the what is without a doubt the heaviest track on dryed so they just seem to work better. It maybe that as they’re the predominant vocal style used for the song, they just sit better. Either way, great track.
One more thing I have to point out is the artwork, courtesy of Kostas Tsiakos (papergoblin.com). We don’t always get the whole booklet / inlay sent through and in this case I’m glad it was included. I absolutely love the graphic novel style artwork and the imagery. It fits perfectly with the band and the songs.
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dryed is out on February 2nd via Bandcamp
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