Chaos in Paradise – Demo (2010)

All the way from Portugal today we get Chaos in Paradise a very young band that is releasing their first demo. This demo features four very interesting songs that showcase the band’s talents, but it also shows the areas where they need work. Since it’s a short demo we will use the dreaded ‘song-by-song’ approach to this review.

The band opens their demo with “Dawn” a very well structured song that features what this band is all about in less than 4 minutes. With powerful riffing, you quickly get the impression this might be a Melodic Death Metal release, but soon Sara’s angelic vocals follow and your whole impression of this album is changed. The band does a very solid job in crafting a powerful chorus section with solid riffing and a catchy vocal melody. However, the small use of male vocals could have easily been avoided and this would have kept the song more consistent.

Next up we have “Heading North”, this song starts with some nice drumming, but the intricate melodic riffing is what will grab you immediately. With such a massive start the band set’s the bar pretty high for this song and they deliver around 85% of our expectations. Here you can notice that Sara’s vocals sound a bit amateurish at points, but with better vocal harmonies this can easily be fixed. Her kind of spoken sections plain sucked and somewhat kill the flow of the song, but the music is just too good for us to really notice them.

“The Meaning of Being Imposed” quickly sets the mood to a slower, ballad-like song that nicely changes the direction of this demo. The cello sounds very good in this song and Sara’s vocals are right at home, delivering a solid sounding performance. The change into a ‘faster’ pace was a bit abrupt but sounds great. Again, the guitars shine through this ballad with powerful riffs and the solo is pretty good.

Lastly, we have “Antagonized” a song that is by far the weakest of this release. This song starts pretty powerful but then it goes into a frenzy of a bunch of crap mashed together, it does sound more aggressive than the rest of the demo but it also feels very disconnected and we don’t think that Sara’s vocals fit well with such ‘fast-paced’ song. We also have the dreadful male vocals back for another small time, just enough to blow the song and destroy the nicely crafted solo at the end of the song.

Overall, we can clearly see that Chaos in Paradise has enough quality to be a good band. Their female singer is pretty good and she does a great job at being herself and not try to growl (not all women can do this well!! please understand people!!!). The guitar work is excellent and very well crafted; there are no complaints from this side. The drumming and the bass guitar are also very good. The problem lies on writing songs as a whole, some songs have great sections but weak overall construction. The band needs to full integrate songs so they sound more cohesive and less chaotic (like “Antagonized”). However, this demo is completely worth your time if you like female fronted metal.

Release: 2010

Country: Portugal