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CANDLELIGHT RED
Demons EP

Imagen (2012)
Rating: 6.5/10

Pennsylvania-based Candlelight Red continue the momentum gained from their digital only debut, The Wreckage (2011), with a new EP entitled Demons. Having toured alongside bands like Sevendust (whose drummer, Morgan Rose, produced this EP), Saving Abel, 10 Years and Egypt Central, the band also landed a slot on this year’s Uproar Festival Jagermeister stage.

Demons is very much in the vein you are expecting to hear when you consider the bands Candlelight Red have played alongside. It’s big, edgy, rock ’n’ roll with a slight metal tinge and a nu-metal swagger that is always lurking around but never fully takes over.

The album opens with the title track, exhibiting those lurking nu-metal nuances I mentioned. While the verses are a bass-driven kind of heavy, the chorus lightens the whole thing up significantly, and the fact that the vocals always sing or melodically scream and never growl or grunt also takes the whole song up a notch dynamically.

It’s the next song though, ‘Cutter’, that really grabbed my attention. It has that Shinedown kinda Carolina rock feel to it, but musically it’s fairly progressive and the musically giant and lyrically intimate chorus just pushes it over the top in a very anthemic way.

‘Lifeless’ continues the forward motion with another big chorus rocker that has a very modern hard rock feel to it. ‘Sleeping Awake’ rounds the disc out with a sombre ballad, that feels more like an obligatory entry than a solid addition to this already too short offering.

Overall, Demons is a solid release. I could do without the ballad (and I like ballads, it just feels out of place here) but, having just seen them on the Uproar Festival tour, it’s a good sampling of what they bring to the table. It’s a big, mostly heavy sound that is more hard rock than anything else but extremely well put together, perhaps nudging some more progressive fans their way.

Mark Fisher

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