FAR FROM MIND is a two piece project from Russia, with someone with the pseudonym Dirty Scoundrel taking care of all of the instrumentation and drum programming, and a fellow by the name of Tim taking care of the lyrical and vocal duties. Their Myspace describes them as a band that is willing to explore a myriad of styles, like Prog Rock, Psychedelic Metal and Industrial Metal, amongst others, and then the band further metamorphosed to include some Gothic Rock/Metal into their sound. From what I’m getting, “Breakpoint ‘33” is a compilation of two separate albums that were released simultaneously (“33: The Night Album” & “33: The Light Album”) back in 2008. Their new label (More Hate Production) decided to package the two as one and released it as “Breakpoint 33”.

The music contained on “Breakpoint 33” is essentially Modern Metal (groovy, mostly mid-tempo and quasi-melodic), mixed in with plenty of Gothic and some Industrial elements. To be completely honest, at first, this mix sounded like being far too much like most of the more “trendy” Metal out there. The band generally uses simple riffs with a good amount of groove and a driving bass line with some keyboards in order to add in some texture. I’m not faulting that approach, but at first I had a problem with the album: the length of the songs. Out of the ten songs, only three are under five and a half minutes long, and the rest of the album consists of songs that are at least six and a half minutes. This wouldn’t be a problem if the songs were well constructed and weren’t static in tempo/groove, but the songs generally had a small number of riffs for their length, and the tempo rarely fluctuated.

Then, either by the music finally clicking or by me convincing myself that what I was listening to was actually well written; I succumbed to what FAR FROM MIND was trying to achieve. By using repetition, the riffs were able to burrow themselves into my brain, and the use of keyboards and electronic samples was what created the changes of mood and feeling as the songs went on. Instead of viewing the songs as being “repetitive”, they started being hypnotic, and in turn the album started becoming far more enjoyable.

The latter half of “Breakpoint ‘33” is far more enjoyable than the first half. It is a lot more melodic than the beginning of the album. It’s almost like the first half of the album just goes unimpressively, but then there is an explosion of melody once “Night Of The Soul” hits.

It’s an enjoyable album, if a tad inconsistent. Half of this is on their Myspace page. Check it out.

(Online August 29, 2009)