CoC : Midnight Scream - Midnight Scream : Review

Midnight Scream - _Midnight Scream_
by: Paul Schwarz (2 out of 5)

Though produced by Nightwish guitar player Mike Galiatsos, Midnight Scream is certainly not congruent with his band's more traditionally heavy metal styled, female vocal accompanied and melodic creations. Instead, _Midnight Scream_ offers us a deeply simplistic three tracks of death metal, plus a traditionally irrelevant keyboard-based intro to bring the track total to four, which are, to be quite frank, severely limited in musical scope and somewhat shoddy in presentation. I get the impression Midnight Scream have let their enthusiasm to get things moving recording-wise get the better of them. _Midnight Scream_ positively -screams- of a band who need more time to tighten up their musical cohesion, while singer Makis Memmos needs to do some serious individual time at the death metal vocalists' school of hard knocks to bang into shape a characteristic and affecting throat which has importance to his band's greater music vision -- something his performance on _Midnight Scream_ quite sorely lacks. That _Midnight Scream_, the demo, is rather under-par does not necessarily mean that Midnight Scream, the band, are a lost cause or entirely without promise. _Midnight Scream_ sounds more like a good band who simply haven't yet put the requisite time in to make great music than a poor bunch of musicians who've pretty much reached their peak. Time is what is needed here; we'll hopefully keep you posted as to any interesting developments.

Contact: Lukas Bergis, Panagouli 1, 17237 Imittos, Athens, Greece

(article published 12/8/2000)