Review Summary: A mess of well-executed ideas.
What do you do when releasing your first material? Do you focus on putting out music that may sound familiar but is tightly put together? Do you come out firing on all cylinders and see what sticks? For the most part, Aberration by Pulse fits the latter description. The band mixes Deathcore, Death Metal, Djent and Metalcore with a surprising amount of atmospheric passages. It creates a living sound that unfortunately isn't as good as the sum of its parts would want you to believe. Is it all still worth listening to in the end? Let's find out.
What is interesting about Pulse is their ability to emulate many styles and succeeding with every one of them. The all-out assault of Oculus' second half is as impressive as Transparancy's build-up or Deity's darker melodies. The main problem is, almost no musical idea is ever repeated or brought back differently troughout the EP's 25 minutes running time, which creates huge pacing problems. The band follows an idea until it doesn't, with very little justifying the way these songs are structured. Listening to this for the first time without paying attention, you could very easily forget where you are in the album's time frame. Burning Decades is the worst offender of this. It's the EP's worst cut due to piss-poor transitions, uninteresting riffs and a general lack of creativy or variety. It just exists for four minutes and has very little to offer.
What the band excels at though is atmospheric build-ups. There are quite a few on this relatively short disc and they all work. One even adds a little dose of clean vocals to switch things up a bit. They sound voluntarily unnatural and the effect kinda works. Vincent Rose's gritty and commanding growls lack a bit of variety, so a bigger use of these cleans may be a good idea in the band's future. What the band is also great at is climaxing these build-ups with some of the band's best riffs. The ultimate example would be the completely unexpected last part of the EP, which hits ten times harder because of the soft clean guitars before it.
In the end, there isn't that much to change in Pulse's core formula. The songs just need to have more of a point to them, to make sense. The riffs are there, the grooves are there, the performances are all solid and there is a legitimate sense of dark heaviness to it all. It doesn't quite all gel together well as good as it should right now, but there's genuine fun to be had listening to this.
