Synopsis:

A slight disappointment to the excellent, Meshuggah inspired debut.

Review:

Hailing from the Netherlands, Textures’ debut album Polars was a impressive slab of angular European metal that along with a solid nod to Meshuggah, injected some modern melodic death metal and thrash elements similar to The Haunted, Mnemic and such. Well, here is album number two, and much like By Night’s recent sophomore album, Drawing Circles is littered with even more commercial appeal and less jagged stuttering metal.

The downfall of this acceptable but hardly potential fulfilling album is the many clean vocal and instrumental sections that break up the slightly less hefty grooves and staggering riffs. Granted there are plenty of burly, hard edged riffs and scowling vocals such as on “Regenesis”, “Denying Gravity”, “Circular” and instrumental closer  “Surreal State of Enlightenment”, but they are littered with rather wimpy clean proggy segues and singing. Only a few tracks, such as “Stream of Consciousness” and “Millstone” are nothing but pure molten metal--but in a genre full of like minded bands, none of it truly grabs me by the throat.

Other tracks forgo the shuddering metal completely such as “Illumination”, “Upwards” and “Touching the Absolute" which come across as almost prog rock, synth flocked fillers or even ballads, rather than modern extreme metal. I’m all for experimentation and growth, as the debut had some nice elements to it, but this is a little too much too quickly and at various points during the album, Textures is barely recognizable as the same band that released Polars to critical acclaim a couple of years ago.

However, musicianship is airtight, the production is top notch, but its a lot of window dressing on a surprisingly wet album that should have catapulted this young band int the elite, but may have actually set them back a bit.