Balero, Balero

On their self-titled EP, Houston band Balero plays instrumental heavy metal. One of the biggest things that annoys me about metal is the singing, so these guys are already more up my alley than most current metal bands. And hey, Slint used death-metal pedals and nobody complained, so why shouldn’t everybody else? The guys in Balero have a decent feel for dynamics, and they’re tight. The problem is that the band seems to be hoping a singer will show up, rather than trying to write music that works on its own — they’re instrumental because they can’t find a singer, not because they deliberately want to play instrumentals.

That’s a big part of the reason the songs sound the same. They’ve all got the same sort of feel, because they use the same ideas over and over. The last three songs (“The Voyage,” “El Mere,” and “Well Look Who It Is”) are almost entirely built on similar-sounding power chord riffs. And the first song, “Drop The Bomb,” uses a guitar line that sounds much like a line in “El Mere.” To top it all off, the first three (“Bomb,” “Voyage,” and “Mere”) are all in the same key. All of this makes them sound very much the same.

The last track, “Well Look Who It Is,” starts off differently, at least — it starts out like some droning Slint-type tune, and there’s a nice slightly dissonant riff in the middle, but then most of the song is exactly like “Voyage” and “Mere.” Even with some overdubbed guitar parts, it goes on for longer than it should (a whole five minutes, for some reason).

If Balero had intended to have a singer, or even an instrumental melody line or something, the songs might have worked better that way, but as it is, it all sounds the same: like it’s missing something.