The Kandidate – Until We Are Outnumbered Review

The Kandidate // Until We Are Outnumbered
Rating: 2.5/5.0 —No reason to come back to this…
Label: Napalm
Websites: thekandidate.com | myspace.com/thekandidate
Release Dates: EU: 27-29.01.2010 | US: 02.09.2010

The Kandidate wasn’t what I was expecting. Like a mix of thrash metal and Agnostic Front, these Danish metallers have produced an album to which I am utterly blase. As Angry Metal Guy, it is my job to have really strong opinions about things one way or another, but instead I listen to this album and I just.. don’t hear much that I want to come back to. On the other hand there’s not much to dis. It’s just an all-in-all mediocre record by a band I’ve never heard before.

There are some good things about this album, however. There’s some great riffing on here. Some of it sounds a little hardcore, but a lot of it sounds like the band was asking themselves “W.W.S.D?” (What Would Slayer Do?) as they were writing the songs. This makes for some interesting moments, and because of the thick production it can be pretty hard to avoid getting into a bit of a groove (I just want to give a shout out to the drummer from the band, who is definitely super talented and the producer who decided to use good thick drums instead of modern production tricks, more power to you!). I mean, let’s face it, this stuff is basically built to be moshed to. You don’t build that kind of music without building a solid groove into your album.

The Kandidate doesn’t pull any punches, either. The tracks are short and fast, the riffs are heavy and blitz you directly out of the gate. But there is just a lack of hooks, which I think is exasperated by the totally bland vocal approach. The vocals are very much of the hardcore variety, and sort of vacillate between that and an almost Tom Arya style clean scream over the top of things. After a few songs it gets pretty damn repetitive. A few variations from this basic formula would have been welcome, but really, the band never strays far from the sort of run-in-place-hardcore kind of vocals that just feel like they lose their extremity with every listen.

The upside to all of this is that this album is short. The Kandidate offers about 32 minutes of music and that’s the end of it. So, for fans of fast, aggressive hardcore and thrash, this might be something to check out. For me, it just blended into the background. There were some cool riffs here and there, some groove that I liked and even a catchy chorus or two. But I doubt that I will come back and listen to this record much after I’ve finished this review. If the band could spice things up a little with some cool technical stuff, and maybe more varied vocals, they definitely have the talent to be putting out excellent records. But Until We Are Outnumbered, despite it’s totally kick ass cover art, doesn’t really seem like much more than a drop in a sea filled with bands doing similar things.

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