Scales

On their debut record, Mythical Beast construct a spare and somber sound spotlighting the strident vocals of Corinne Sweeney, whose full and deep tone could easily have some listeners mistaking her singing for that of a man. There's some hard rock and even metal here in the penetrating sternness of those vocals and the booming fuzzy (and sometimes reverberant pulsating) guitars, but it's pretty far from a hard rock or metal album. Despite the volume of the guitars, it's a rather lonesome-sounding, stark recording. The guitar bursts often act more as punctuations to Sweeney's declarations than as standard rock accompaniment, and while there's percussion, it's used more for ritual (indeed sometimes funereal) accentuation than to keep the usual rock rhythms. There's nary a light moment in the portentous melodies, and a touch of goth in the ideogrammatic lyrical portrayals of cold, dark, shadowy, submerged, vaguely sexual situations and states of mind. Part metal, part goth, part bombastic prog rock, it's unremitting in its fairly desolate ambience, though deserving of points for doing so in more minimal and spacious arrangements than most such bands do, whether overground or underground.