Ira
The Body and the Soil
Go Kart
I recently found a cheap used copy of Metallica’s Master of Puppets used at a local CD store and bought it for nostalgic purposes. That album encapsulates everything I loved about metal at age 14 and this disc, Ira’s The Body and the Soil is rife with the bastardized sound that’s turned me off. Composed of nine tracks, mostly alternating between epic allusions to prog-metal, metal-core and other dilutions and ambient linking numbers that only serve to stretch out the more cohesive songs. When the band finds its focus and lets its chops take the foreground, like the opener “Soil” and “You’re Living All Over Me” they could easily position themselves as stars for the “Alternative Press” set, add to that a German exoticism that manifests in spoken word passages and it’s almost something I could recommend to a certain group of listeners… then I think about Master of Puppets and its impeccable songwriting, its melding of classical guitar and shredding brutality and I can’t help but feel that this overly emotional sub-genre has lost too much of what made its parent sound so great. The complacency and confusion is what lost me in the mid-‘90s and it hasn’t improved 10 years on.
Go Kart Records: http://www.gokartrecords.com
