Woodscream - "Pentadrama" EP 2010

WOODSCREAM - Pentadrama (EP 2010)

Folk Metal - Russia

http://www.myspace.com/woodscream

     Saint-Petersburg Folk metal band Woodscream is a pretty young band I think, both for the members' age and for band's activity. They have released this year 1 Single, "Svartedauen" and this "Pentadrama" as their debut EP. The band is composed by 3 guys and 2 girls, and in this case, as you can easily guess it, they are a female fronted, the main vocals being clear female (Russian Folk oriented) vox. Valentina Tsyganova is the one singing, but apart she has a good voice, she also does the backing vocals, the flutes and whistles parts and takes care of the percussions also, so we have a poli-instrumentist here, and a quite good one I might add. The other girl in the band, Anastasia Guseva, plays the violin and her touch is very important in Woodscream's music, basically that's the main Folkish element inhere. Alexander Klimov plays the guitars and from time to time he adds his hoarse vocals, a very good addition. His guitar playing is mostly straight forward metal style, but he also uses acoustic guitar elements. The other two guys in the band, Ivan Budkin on bass and Pavel Malyshev on drums seem like they are a bit marginalized, but in fact they are the backbone of this band, the Metal scaffold on which everything else is build. 

     After this band introduction I should also speak about this debut EP that contains 5 tracks and totalize about 17 minutes. It's a good material to meet the band and make your mind on them. I would normally name this a demo, but it has a crystal clear sound and production so an EP isn't a bad label after all. The compositions are good but not outstanding, it's an easy listening but unfortunately you won't remain with much afterwards. Having in mind that this is a very young band the situation changes and I can clearly say that if they keep working on their compositions we might have a very good band in Woodscream in the near future. And also they might add more of those keyboard touches that are present a few times on Pentadrama, at least I would very much like that. On this release they seem to try too many things and at the end nothing is completely done, but I'm sure time will make them settle on their own path.

Kaan