You know what’s not atypical? A metal band gelling together two different styles of metal to create something different with a neat sound. What is atypical, you ask? Mixing together post and alternative metal. On their own those two sub-genres aren’t that much to take in depending on the band, but put them together you get this weird image in your head of something that you weren’t expecting to imagine. I didn’t, anyway. What Stabbed has done with their debut EP “Submerge” is honestly a concoction I’ve never seen before. That being said, there’s not a whole lot of really “crazy” stuff with this album as it is quite pretty much what a post-alternative record would sound like, but it soundly oddly good even though at first I thought it would be rather underwhelming. The vocals were very smooth and brought a melodic vibe to the music, the guitars were absolutely filled to the brim with riffs, the bass had a fabulous groove going on in the background, and the drums had a perfect beat to for this five track album to make the pacing spot on for maximum awesomeness. Out of all those things, the one thing that really gets me going for “Submerge” is the fact that sometimes the vocal style will shift to something that’s more like sludge metal which gives the EP a good edge that I cannot appreciate enough because it adds a good amount of texture to the otherwise not so edgy music. And if that’s not good enough to fulfill your fix then maybe the fact that there are another five tracks to “Submerge” that are instrumental versions of the normal album if you don’t like the vocals, and the songs work better as instrumental more compared to other bands’ attempts. Overall, this is a very solid EP because it shows a band’s take on a different idea and executed in a pretty nice way. “Submerge” wasn’t a perfect album, but it definitely shows that Stabbed has got a good idea, but they just have got to have more experience before creating a really solid album, and when that day comes I will happily sit down and listen to what they got.
You can stream Stabbed on Bandcamp here, and purchase it via iTunes here.
