?Classics? of power metal #14: LOVEBITES - Awakening From Abyss (2017), early impressions

Previous exposure to this artist/album:  Just a few listens to a few songs in the background.  They sounded pretty cool. 

Note:  Just to avoid eyesore, LOVEBITES shall hereafter be known as Lovebites, and other bands that I mention in posts about them will have their names written normally rather than in ALL CAPS.

I've mentioned a few times my approach to diving into the well of new music by deciding on a listen by listen basis whether or not to listen to each record three times, and then to decide from there whether it gets thrown into my running list of candidates to consider further for the year-end top-fifteen.  Minus the annual list, my approach to listening to older music is pretty similar.  It's a moot point when I'm reviewing something to write about, because of course I'm going to be listening to it a lot.  But if I were just checking out this band in my free time, would Awakening From Abyss get a listen #3 based on how I felt after listens #1-2?  It would.  But it'd be on a short leash.  I'm not loving Awakening yet.  I'm not ready to give up on loving it.

Probably the two biggest draws of the record so far are the mix of styles and the division of labor.  Awakening From Abyss is another in the line of records I've been writing about from young bands firmly apart from the early generations of metal, which gives them freedom to combine their favorite parts.  In most regards they're almost USPM-adjacent, with the guitars generally being down-tuned with a lot of migration amongst the power chords the way thrash metal does.  And a prominent role for then-bassist and major songwriter, Miho.  But the keys, which I believe come mostly from Miyako, change the aesthetic when present.  When an Awakening track goes keyboard-heavy, that dominates the sound, and  suddenly we're listening to riffscapes that wouldn't be out of place on a 2000s Kamelot record.  Or maybe more relevant, on those songs, Lovebites then sound like they're serving up the same kind of mix of speedy virtuosic EUPM and '80s pop-rock singing that I've heard in my tiny tastes of their countrymen from Galneryus.  But again, only on some songs.  The vocal cadence being so bright and chatty could fit with either aesthetic, depending on the song.  I dunno, my incredibly ill-informed stereotype of what "metal from Japan" sounds like has a dated '80s sound, and even though Lovebites has many of the same elements as my stereotype does, they sound more contemporary.  No individual ingredient in the stew is something I haven't already eaten a bunch of, but the particular proportions of spices do make it count as a new recipe to me, metaphorically speaking.

As far as the long instrumental bridges go, I of course don't gravitate towards them, but I'm struck by the fact that it seems like at any given time 75% of the band is going to stick to the main riff while one member is going to go crazy... and I can never predict who's going to take the big solo at any moment.  I also want to share my early appreciation of Haruna, the drummer, who I notice just about the right amount for a drummer.  She plays fast and keeps the beat, like you want from a PM drummer, whilst throwing in enough sophisticated change-ups to spice up the music.  Everyone's got a lot of skill, whilst the songs sound like collaborations, a full-band effort.  That could yield some nice results.

But not quite yet, for me.  To be clear, the record sounds good to my ears, in a sort of background way.  And each listen has sounded better than the one before for me.  I think the biggest thing holding me back from going full fan is a basic mismatch in priorities.  I'm a vocal melody person.  Lovebites' vocals are their weakness.  I don't think Asami is a particularly good singer, but that's not actually the big issue, since the type of metal they're attempting doesn't necessarily demand a great singer.  As long as she doesn't try to hit too many notes outside her middle range, I ought to be able to deal with a competently unspectacular singer who could maybe enunciate the English words better*.  The bigger problem for me is that I'm a vocal melody person listening to a record whose tunes aren't really the emphasis at all, compared to the riffs and the solos.  Maybe that's why on early listens I've bounced off the likes of "Warning Shot" and cringed a little at "Burden Of Time," while gravitating towards the more sing-songy entries, even when those melodies get a little insipid.  "Scream For Me" instantly appeals to me in a way that the earlier tracks don't.  And while I don't know whether I'm going to end up loving "Inspire" and "Don't Bite The Dust" or whether they're going to get annoying through repetitiousness, I can say that they stand out amongst the indistinct blur around them.

Granted, it's early.  On listen #3 - played in the background as I was writing this up - "The Hammer Of Wrath" is growing on me with the way they craft a very-end-of-chorus hook; as previously noted, I like those.  I just wish the slightly more involved efforts, the multi-part slow building "Edge Of The World" in particular, would get on with it and start growing on me already.  But "The Apocalypse" and "Bravehearted" seem to be almost there, maybe just one more listen will do it...

A few other things:

- I'm inclined to call "Bravehearted" a self-cover, because even though three others besides that one also come from the band's first EP, "Bravehearted" used to be in Japanese and now it's not.  I'll have to spend more time with the two versions and decide whether this was the right change to make.

- I was a little thrown by the drawing on the album cover.  There's a fantasy priestess type - innocent looking long-haired young woman in white, glowing staff - and a Sonata style wolf beside her.  Yeah, gentle and feral at once, blah blah blah.  That combined with the way "The Awakening" starts soft before dropping into a big riff seemed at first like they were going a little too hard into the "look at us subvert your expectations!" thing.  I mean, this isn't a Band-Maid situation here, wherein presumably the whole point is to play on the contrast between "soft" and "hard" aesthetics.  Lovebites aren't a gimmick band in that way, right?  They're just a metal band playing metal, I thought?  Yet, Wikipedia has a whole section about the dressing in all white being a calculated image** to make them stand out and the "lone wolf" on their album art being part of that.  That's the 21st century for you - a brand is important, even when it's not a full-on "gimmick."  I guess it worked, in that Lovebites already don't quite sound exactly like anyone else to me, and seeing the promotional photos/videos of small ladies in long dresses jumping around grinning further sells the singularity.

- Speaking of fun with Wikipedia, their entry talks about the band's inspiration from older metal but emphasizes stuff like Iron Maiden.  While this entry also claims that Asami tends to emphasize the thrash influence.  Based on what I'm hearing from Awakening I'd be inclined to call them more power-thrash disciples than NWOBHM.  Definitely some Metallica in the guitar work, and to me the most obvious antecedent would be Painkiller-era Judas Priest, which I see people argue skirts the edges of our definitions of what is or isn't USPM.  Meanwhile, Haruna's big inspiration as a drummer was apparently that most EUPM of all bands, Helloween, and specifically Kusch-era Helloween.  Which, as I like to say, may well explain something or other.

Favorite track:  "Scream For Me"

Runner up:  "The Apocalypse"  

Least favorite track:  "Burden Of Time"

Preliminary rating:  3/5

 

Next:  More on Awakening From Abyss, whenever I get around to it!

* Obviously, English being the official language of power metal means I get to theoretically understand a high proportion of the music from around the word, but have to deal with a lot of clear non native speakers whose ability to sell what they're singing about is sometimes compromised by the language barrier.

**The single-name band members is part of building a brand too, but Japanese acts of basically every music genre had already been doing that for decades before Lovebites, so I assume they're just par for the course.