This sounds like an intermediate guitarist's dream - riffs upon riffs, left and right, supported by clicky drums and carried away by dancing keyboard leads before that great keybird in the sky drops them off at the next section. A bit progressive. a bit melodic, a bit symphonic, a bit epic - it's a little bit of everything. I'm not certain these guys know what they want to do, other than wanting to do everything. Everything in modern metal. At once. (ed. the band lists their genre as "Epic Progressive Blackened Death Metal")
The shortcoming of this extremely busy style is that with all the intersecting traffic of guitars, vocals, and keyboards, they don't trade off a clear melodic or rhythmic lead in the songs. There isn't much interplay between the instruments - for example, a guitar chugging while the vocals deliver a line and adding a fancy tail to the riff as the vocals finish. The guitars are omnipresent but tend to simply repeat riffs with no regard for the keyboards and vocals, which feel like they're jumping into something that's already going on when they come in, rather than having the music make way for them to come in. The compositions lack grace.
Malphas are like a talkative youngster who aspires to be a great storyteller. The right words may be contained in the story, but their tale is more distracting than alluring.
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