Screaming Beast are a duo from Manchester whose Metal is a sort of Pantera with louder guitar solos and a touch more melody. The tracks within this EP sound tight and would get a Metal audience going with ease.

I didn’t like some of the vocal effects and in fact I wasn’t too excited about the vocals anyway. It seemed to me that Anton War (Screaming Beast’s singer) was sometimes shouting to try and sound angry with little in the way of technique. Daniel Mucs plays all the instruments and I don’t know if a drum machine is used but there were a number of instances – such as in the latter part of ‘This Fray’ – where the drums sounded excessively synthetic. Contrastingly, Mucs’ guitarwork is solid and raises the music’s quality a few notches.

There’s enough groove, grit and passion in this EP to convince the listener that Screaming Beast are not to be taken lightly but if the music is a jigsaw puzzle it still has a few missing pieces. Put another way, I sort of like this music but I can’t get myself to fall head over heels for the band...yet.