I Stared Into the Forest, Society Discontinued (Fading Halo, 2011)

From Fading Halo Records comes this six-song, 15-minute EP from Romanian act I Stared Into the Forest. To my ears this feels like kind of a weird fusion of "screamo" and grindcore. The vocals are gnarly, strained snarls (with a few distant spoken passages buried in the background from time to time) while musically they're dealing with a lot of dissonance and peculiar arrangements. Expect dense, churning chord progressions loaded with atypical note choices and noisy, angular textures; tremolo picking with quick bursts of blasting percussion; and—perhaps most importantly—some unexpected dashes of somber melody that add an entirely different dimension to the mix. I Stared Into the Forest definitely strikes me as one of those intriguing bands that manages to create a familiar sound that can't be immediately pigeonholed into one genre or another, and is actually not very straightforward at all. I've not seen a physical copy of the CD firsthand, but based on the photos it looks to be housed in some old school DIY packaging consisting of a screenprinted chipboard sleeve with one xeroxed insert for each song (containing lyrics and explanations). Good stuff. Stream the entire album below and see what you think:

CD's are available for just 5€, and all involved parties have been kind enough to throw the EP up as a free download, too, so... there's no excuse not to give this a shot!

Get It

• Fading Halo Records (CD)
• Fading Halo Records (free download)