Sometines the differences are marginal, but these marginal differences makes the load tumble. For Harasai from Essen in Germany, the load tumbles for yours truly. 'Psychotic Kingdom', the band's second album is not bad per se. Parts of it even sound fabulous. But sometimes that isn't enough to make an album really good.
I've listened to this album quite a few times over the past months (yeah, I know, it's been lying around for a long, long time, and the Christmas holiday is SO much the time to get through the heaps of albums which are waiting for a review as some of you will have noticed the past few days), and I am struggling to get past the notion that this is more than anything a Heaven Shall Burn clone band with a touch of Swedish melodic death metal. And even if I'm a great believer in what HSB do (and in Swedish melodic death metal for that matter), their fellow countrymen here fail to have the same impact. Going back to my initial talk about marginal differences, it can really be down to the pitch of the vocals, a tuning that's a bit different, or perhaps the songs just aren't as well written, whatever, the impact isn't the same.
Bottomline is that 'Psychotic Kingdom' doesn't catch on with this old hack, even if it's occasionally alright.
