Band:	Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Album:	Burepolom
Style:	Alternative metal, Progressive metal
Release date:	September 22, 2008
A review by:	Bas

01. Jerkwater
02. Low Self Esteem
03. Anyone
04. Neurotted
05. Beat Me Down
06. Railway To...
07. Burepolom
08. Still Love
09. The Traveller
10. Falling From Eternity

Damnit! This is by far the most interesting release of '08 for me and I'm reviewing it at the beginning of the new year!

Anyway let's start at the beginning. The very first thing I thought upon receiving this CD was "What the fuck is that on the cover?" After a lot of intense staring I managed to figure out that it must be some kind of (uncomfortable) mechanical chair that someone can be fastened to. The second question was what the album title (written in Cyrillic letters) means. Luckily the promo sheet added with the CD told me it's "Burepolom" the name of a tiny Russian village in the middle of nowhere. And when we ask Wikipedia it tells us "Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to one or more terrifying events that threatened or caused grave physical harm."

Those were the easy things to explain, now on to the music. Before writing this review I read a few already existing ones on the net, just out of curiosity. I've seen this album being called nu metal, deathcore, progressive and even emo - all very wrong in my humble opinion. Most of the time reviewers stuck with what the promo sheet said though; "depressive crossover metal". My own genre classification has to be "depressive progressive alternative metal" though. Can't imagine what it sounds like? No problem!

Think of Korn, Katatonia, Faith No More, Alice In Chains, Deftones, Paradise Lost, Soulfly and maybe a bit of Evergrey; then proceed by cutting various elements of their music out and gluing them together in a wild but carefully thought-out structure. If you managed to do that you get something comparable to Burepolom.

With two guitarists most of the album is quite heavy, yet there are also a few relatively calm moments, these are further enforced by the occasional use of short keyboard parts. The vocals vary between clean singing, screaming, shouting, grunting and growling. Sometimes the music seems to be totally chaotic but sooner or later it will always return a perfectly structured state. Rough and melodic, structured and chaotic, progressive and straightforward, unpredictable yet so familiar at times, P.T.S.D. do all of it at the same time. Every single song is totally different and there is always a truckload of things going on.

Perhaps some of you will listen to this and find it absolutely uninteresting, this is hardly an "easy" CD to fully grasp. I myself needed quite a number of listens until I was fully convinced, I started out thinking "Hmm, kinda interesting" and now I consider this album a genius piece of art. Who knows, maybe I'm the one who's hyping this band without any reason at all and all of you will shake your heads and wonder why this release seems so amazing to me. However while listening to it right now I couldn't care less.

If you really hate either gothic or alternative metal and are rather close-minded about it, or if you have problems with completely erratic and unpredictable music, don't listen to it. You'll probably hate it. As for me, all I can say is "Wow!". Apart from that I consider this being one of the most interesting CDs that I have ever heard; I just remembered reading that this is their debut album. I can't wait for more.