Band:	Solar Scream
Album:	Ground Level
Style:	Progressive metal
Website:	http://www.solarscream.hu
Release date:	2004
A review by:	Jeff

01. Subsurface (instr.)
02. Ground Level
03. Dead Like Stones
04. This Order
05. Transgression (instr.)
06. In Your Room [Depeche Mode cover]

Bands like Anathema, Porcupine Tree or Pain Of Salvation are probably so influential that we can find nowadays a lot of new combos that decide to play such progressive "dark" music. We got lately some bands like the Polishes of Riverside but now you'll have to check a great newcomer from Hungary, Solar Scream. Their first demo "Ground Level" is really impressive?

The band plays a really nice progressive Metal, really dark and depressive, and it remembers me some album like the last Anathema. However it's a bit more "Metal", we have overdrive guitars on this CD and the riffs can be heavy but always slow and insistent. This is a bit depressive maybe but always beautiful and I cannot say the opposite, this demo is really catchy.

This is a first demo and all is not perfect. The demo is a bit unequal; some songs are better than some others. If "Dead Like Stones" is a really interesting song with some great parts of progressive music and an amazing general ambiance, a song like "Ground Level" a lot more aggressive suffer of the comparison. On the other hand the 3rd real original song of the demo "This Order" is just a pure masterpiece of Prog Music. Touching and beautiful with some amazing breaks and melodies, we are in front of the perfect promising song for a young band. With something like that you can only catch the attention of a good progressive label. Also, the voices of the singers are not perfect sometime, but this is not a real problem because it's in general easy to fix this kind of problem with time, work and experience.

The production for a demo is not bad at all, especially the artwork of the CD and booklet. It's really professional and if the sound is not the best ever, at least it's not so hard to listen to all the effects of the music (only the drum is not really well mixed actually). But with such work anyway you can only expect the best for the future of a band.

Solar Scream is a young band, all is not perfect on this first demo, but this is one of the biggest surprises of the year for me. I will say (and without any risk) that this band will probably find success if they know how to write some other songs in the spirit of "This Order". Let me tell you that we will probably have to count on this band. If you just pretend to like progressive music, please have a look on this excellent "Ground Level".

Note that you can download the whole demo on the website of the band http://www.solarscream.hu