Surrealevance

Carson gave this album on2011-03-07.

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A couple of weeks ago, I was sent a review copy of Surrealevance by Cranial Collide. I was really surprised by the quality of the album as well as the production quality.

Many bands have good drums, guitar, or vocals but Cranial Collide is one of the few groups (and one of the exceedingly few metal groups) that excel at all three. The intros on "Smashed" and "Simon Says" are phenomenal and the former reminds me - in both feel and quality - a bit of intros to some of the Megadeth's newer tracks such as "Die Dead Enough".

I kept getting an Evanescence feel from the vocals. After looking at Cranial Collide's site, this made total sense as Kayla credits Amy Lee as one of her inspirations.

Actually, I was having trouble getting a bead on what exactly Cranial Collide's sound was at first. Don't get me wrong it's a great sound but hard to pidgeon-hole; this is a good thing though as knock off bands never compare to the real thing. While reading through the members' profiles the reason for the hard to place sound became evident: they cite influences as varied as Classic Rock (Ann Wilson) to Progressive Metal(Mike Portnoy) and from Jazz (Buddy Rich) to Speed Metal (Dragonforce).

This wide range of influences means that you can listen to the album a dozen times and still hear something new. It also mean that Cranial Collide's future releases should always sound fresh and new.

Surrealevance is a solid album and definitely worth checking out.

Track	Name		Carson	Katherine		Track	Name		Carson	Katherine
1	Deep Water					4	Perpetual Enmity
2	Smashed					5	Simon Says
3	Forest