JINJER

The song itself is brilliant not just for Tatiana's undeniably marvelous vocals but also for the versatility of the musicians and the beautifully conceived musical transitions. It is not just Tatiana who renders clean vocals in the vein of Anneke. The accompanying music too is in the vein of The Gathering with lovely guitar textures and very restrained, soft work on the drums. And then, they shift nimbly and literally at the flick of a switch to a brutal metal passage as Tatiana gets into growls. The vocal melody for the 'clean' portion is quite beautiful too.

In short, if every song on this album was as good as Pisces, this would be an unmatchable masterpiece of progressive metal with few peers. Yeah, not kidding.

Unfortunately, much of the rest, while extremely competently conceived and rendered, is much more generic. I have trouble distinguishing the other songs even after listening to the album several times. This is because where Pisces achieves a brilliant light and shade effect by contrasting the clean, atmospheric mellow sections with the 'growled' ones, the other songs offer a much more straight up, unrelenting brutal metal attack.

If anything, I find it quite strange that a band that could write a song as masterful as Pisces would not have waited a bit for more inspiration to kick in and write songs of a similar caliber. By that, I don't mind more Gathering-meets-Morbid Angel songs. I just mean songs that similarly open up incredible possibilities for metal.

This is not an unreasonable expectation for Judgment and Punishment is similarly stunning without evoking Gathering in the slightest. That is, Pisces is hardly a fluke. The band is certainly capable of more such brilliant, pathbreaking music. Well, I suppose the other, more straight up songs draw the metal fans into their shows so they serve their purpose alright.

But for this perhaps unreasonable and demanding reviewer, more of Pisces would have taken the album into a whole other tier of greatness. As it stands, I am going to reward the experimentation of Pisces with a four while noting that I would only give a three for the rest of the album.

The fist release to come out with this lineup was the EP titled INHALE, DON'T BREATHE which originally featured seven tracks but subsequent versions also included three extra live bonus tracks. For whatever reason the EP only shows five tracks on JINJER's Bandcamp page. At this stage JINJER featured no progressive features in its compositions and squarely fit into the world of melodic metalcore with a groove metal flow including a few deviations into alternative rock during brief slower moments. The most distinct feature of the band is probably the fact that this style of extreme metal is fronted by a female singer.

This band has been quite popular in its native Ukraine as it became more varied over its three album run but at this point the band had pretty much only gotten its head around being a band and was content simply sailing in the groove fueled metalcore style that served as an underpinning of its later releases and the band wouldn't really take off until 2016's "KIng Of Everything." Not much to say about this one. The tracks are a bit too similar as the same groove and chord progressions pretty much haunt every track and the same tradeoff between clean and shouted extreme vocals never deviates from the plan.

I can't say this is my favorite style of metal first of all but i can appreciate some good metalcore that infuses heavy doses of creativity in unexpected ways however JINJER does none of that one this early offering and wouldn't really branch out for a few more years. For my ears this is a pretty average if not dull example of melodic metalcore that sounds very amateurish and uninspiring however there is nothing absolutely horrible either. It's just that there is no variation between tracks and the one-trick pony show gets old very quickly. Probably interesting for true fans of the band who need to explore the origins but honestly i don't like the band's name, don't like its sound and am confident i'll never be retreading this generic grounds again.

2.5 rounded down