I’m a fan of melody over technicality, so it’s no surprise that, although the opener is tons of fun, these tracks are far more to my liking, and these two middle tracks are two of my favourite tracks released in 2012. And regardless, the brooding intro to “Hexaton” that reminds me of some of Coheed’s longer tracks like “21:13” and “The Light and the Glass” is just too good to slap it for having a breakdown.īut the other two tracks here both sound like a metal Coheed and Cambria with some occasional flourishes of Protest in the guitar lines. There are some brief metalcore influences from Protest in the final track “Hexaton”, but by the time that’s hit, I’m too into this to complain about a small section with growling. It’s a fast and attacking track, led by that undeniable cool opening riff throughout, and kept afloat by some fantastic vocal lines. The first track here, “The Kingdom and the Crown”, is definitely towards the Protest end of Mandroid’s spectrum, and honestly feels like the sort of track that I want Protest The Hero to make, but they’re too busy screaming and shouting over their flashy instrumentation. But honestly here, with the unique clean vocals reminiscent of Claudio Sánchez and Protest’s insanely tight instrumentation, this little EP reaches heights beyond either of those bands (although in hindsight a couple of tracks from The Afterman are better, that was released after this). I don’t think I’ve ever heard a band who can be so simply put down to two influences, especially when those two bands are in completely different realms of music. Musically, this is nearly a pure fusion of Protest the Hero and Coheed and Cambria. It just raises the music up to a level far beyond any harsh vocals could, and of course it also helps that some of the melodies sung here are utterly fantastic. I know that it’s not a very good thing to say as a music writer, but I probably wouldn’t have given this EP a second listen if there weren’t a clean vocalist here. Back when I first was getting into this EP, nearly two years ago now, the thing that impressed me the most about Mandroid Echostar was their use of clean vocals where nearly every band in this area of music would elect to vomit and retch over their great instrumentals.
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