PALEDUSK-PALEHELL
Japanese band Paledusk have been twisting heads since their arrival on the scene, and their latest EP PALEHELL does not scale back on their intensely forward-looking ambition nor do anything to derail the hype train with its level of craftsmanship, densely-packed songs, and dizzying array of abrupt stylistic left turns and genre shifts.
"PALEHELL" kicks the EP off with its pop punk meets hoe-down meets metal meets arena rock with an anthemic chorus; it’s a massively-catchy song that showcases a more restrained (relatively-speaking) side of the band. Track two, "SUPER PALE HORSE" featuring CVLTE, leads off with a deranged mash-up of what sounds like the kind of organ you might hear at a hockey game with an old Nintendo videogame soundtrack and some Sirius XM Octane-core with another anthemic chorus in tow; with yet more diverse influences incorporated, it’s another example of the band’s experimentation looking zany and all over the place on paper that counter-intuitively flows seamlessly and is not just a coherent song but is a rousing success. Similarly but more exhaustively, "I’m ready to die for my friends" featuring VIGORMAN is a wild ride of rap, reggaeton, rockabilly, drum n bass, Disney Channel-like pop, metal (there’s a nasty breakdown in there), some tongue-in-cheek cult-like vibes, and more, and although that reads like everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, it somehow works, and well.
"TRANQUILO!” is anything but—a savage, glitchy borderline deathcore cut that clocks in at less than a minute-and-a-half. At its outset, "RUMBLE" hints at the shape the song will take in its second half but not before some punishing metalcore followed by a part that sounds like the interlude in "Smack My Bitch Up" by The Prodigy; the band then segues back into its post-modern variant of metalcore, followed by this strange klezmer-ish part, then some throwback nervous-breakdown-core-style metalcore. Following that, the second half of the song finds Paledusk and Masato Hayakawa of Coldrain doing a soaring rendition of "boy band metal"-meets-Babymetal.
The penultimate track "NO!" flies by in less than two minutes of delirious djenting before we get the Crossfaith-esque "Q2," a comparison which makes sense with that band’s feature; "Q2" brings what is at times a rollercoaster of a listen in the best possible sense to a satisfying conclusion in its strength as a track and in its tonal symmetry with the EP’s opening. Fresh and invigorating, Paledusk are a force, and these seven songs are more evidence why.