DESERT NEAR THE END – Tides of Time

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6.5

• Bands:
  DESERT NEAR THE END
• Duration: 00:56:00
• Available from: 06/12/2024
• Label:

• Theogonia Records

Dealing with bands that come from Greece is almost always a guarantee of attitudinal and executive intensity: these fierce Athenian power-thrashers Desert Near The End, veterans of the Hellenic scene, who have reached their sixth full-length with this “Tides Of Time” are no exception. -length of their career, the first on the Theogonia Records label.
Reborn in 2010 from the ashes of the previous incarnation, under the name The Eventide, under the aegis of singer Alexandros Papandreou and bassist Akis Prasinikas, Ours continues on their upright musical path offering us a new handful of songs in which the power-thrash of Chiara American origin (impossible not to grasp the influence of Iced Earth in the riffs woven by the pair of axes Vasilakis-Ioakeim) mixes with European-style epic music, strengthening everything with references to death and black metal.
The result is a sound that certainly makes impact its main weapon, despite the frequent use of melody and calibrated orchestrations contributing to giving the whole thing less predictable and monolithic connotations.
To get an idea of ​​the stylistic ambitions of this new album, there is no better way than to dedicate a careful listen to the belligerent opener “City Of Eternal Flame”, characterized by a very square thrashy riffing, on which the in-tuned vocal lines stand out stentorianly. by the abrasive voice of Alexandros, all cloaked in a dark epicness, for a result that cannot fail to recall Jon Schaffer's aforementioned band, especially that of the “Night Of The Stormrider”-”Burnt Offerings”.
To give everything a further infernal touch, as we said, the band throws death-black cuts into the mix in which the blast-beat of drummer Stelios Pepinidis leads the way, distributing everything with a certain effectiveness on a plot structural with decidedly theatrical connotations.
There is no shortage of other noteworthy episodes, such as the pressing “Oceans Of Time”, the martial “Half-Learned And Long Forgotten” or the triumphal “Burn Like The Sun, Shine Like The Dawn” and, in general, all album is quite pleasant to listen to, but… there is a 'but'. In fact, there is more than one.
First of all, despite the good technical skills and the evident knowledge of the subject matter, the band seems to encounter difficulties in finding the right melody or the right refrain that can be imprinted without a way out in the listener's imagination, little helped in this from a vocal setting that is undoubtedly rocky, but whose lack of register changes does not allow the songs to enjoy the necessary dynamism, nor to see what should be their key moments adequately underlined. If we add to this a central part of the album that is a little too set on medium tempos, whereas Desert Near The End instead seems to give their best when the bpm rises and the compositions become more torrential, it is easy to understand why the the overall result of this “Tides Of Time” is only partially satisfying.
The band, in fact, demonstrates here that it has important weapons in its arsenal, but that it needs to sharpen its blades a little more before being able to compete on an equal footing with the giants of the genre, past and present.