Full Length Review: One Year Delay "Indigo" (Independent) by Dave Wolff

Band: One Year Delay

Location: Kalamata

Country: Greece

Genre: Metalcore, alternative

Full Length: Indigo

Format: Digital

Label: Independent

Release date: March 2019

The Greek alterna-metalcore band One Year Delay recorded their debut full length “Deep Breath” in 2014 and had it picked up by Pavement Entertainment the next year. Apparently it created enough of a buzz to allow the band to follow it with a sophomore effort. If there’s any point made by them on their latest full length “Indigo”, it’s that a band can still be extreme and cutting edge while drawing from Korn, Primus, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails and Limp Biskit while gaining an edge from Sepultura and Pantera.

The cover art with its similarities to Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” suggests a trippy listening experience with a quasi-nineteen-sixties vibe and relentlessly repetitive meters that induce you to enter the funnel built by their varying influences, a funnel taking you into the bottomless depths of the band’s hallucinatory visions. A series of phantasms that become increasingly real the more you travel through them.

“Indigo” represents the logical progression of the post-alternative/nu metal started by bands like Sevendust in the latter 1990s if given free rein to experiment with a variety of chord progressions, sounds and effects while preserving the heaviness one started with. The guitar and bass lines come across as sharp and meticulously arranged while the keyboards add a noncorporeal feel and the vocals intersperse agonized roars and melodic harmonizing with equal certitude. A band such as this needs solid, precise percussion to hold all this together and One Year Delay provides this, completing a sound all their own with no room for direct comparison.

While their first album was recorded in Nashville, TN USA with Toby Wright of Metallica and Alice in Chains fame, “Indigo” was helmed by Fredrik Nordstrom in Gothenburg, Sweden. Nordstrom’s work with the likes of At the Gates, Opeth, In Flames and Arch Enemy is likely what boosted the band’s heavier inclinations. In the three years since its release, “Indigo” seems to have aged well and sounds like it has the potential to stay relevant due to its unique character. –Dave Wolff

Lineup:

Orestis: Vocals

Peter Alimonos: Vocals

Nick Koumoundouros: Guitar

Stavros Tsotras: Bass

Haris Kolozis: Drums

Track list:

1. Escape From Monkey Island

2. Indigo Flow

3. Nanohopes

4. One Of Those Days

5. Going Ballistic

6. Jungle High

7. Landslide

8. Sisyphus

9. The Y Axis