Album Review: Van Canto - To The Power Of Eight

How much mileage can you get our of a gimmick? That will depend on how much talent sits behind said gimmick, but also in how much we want to like it. There are some gimmicks that are so stupid I want the band to fail, and there are other gimmicks I find charming enough I want to give them every opportunity to prove themselves. Van Canto falls somewhere in the middle of that range, where their a capella metal is so silly I want to like it, yet not good enough for me to actually do so. I have listened to them before, and I have been on the verge of being on board, but recently their songs haven't been good enough for me to look past the shortcomings.

On their eighth album, Van Canto is now established enough that the novelty factor is gone. The shock of hearing metal played without a single guitar is long since passed, and now the music must stand on its own.

The biggest problem I have with their vocal music is apparent as soon as we get past the unnecessary introductory track. They don't just sing the guitar parts, they give them syllabic interpretations. That means while I'm trying to listen to some of the melodies of the lead vocals, I can hear "rakkatakka", among other identifiable semi-words. It's completely distracting, as well as often being too silly for me to take with a straight face. When they stick to recreating chord tones, it's easy to forget what's going on. You can't do that when they sound like Muppets.

Another major problem are the 'guitar solos' on the record. I'm not sure what exactly they are doing to create them, but they are awful. They all sound wobbly and out of tune, and completely unprofessional. This saying was in the context of wrestling, but it applies to this scenario as well; "Don't do shit you don't know how to do." Those words carry a lot of weight, and Van Canto needs to heed them. Those guitar solos are something they can't do, and they shouldn't attempt them, because it turns even the better moments on this album into a joke.

Really, even those problems could be mostly overlooked if the songs on this record were great. They aren't. We get covers of Amon Amarth, AC/DC, and Iron Maiden, and those are really the only songs that stand out. The original compositions, as has been the case previously, don't land with me. I would think the lack of instruments would actually give Van Canto the ability to create things that would otherwise not be thought of, but their original songs are less interesting and more anonymous than their covers.

Some musicians are great performers, some are great writers. The number who are great at both is incredibly small, and Van Canto continues to prove this point. They have fascinating abilities with their voices, but they don't do much of note with them. Sad to say, they continue to be a gimmick in search of the music to give them legitimacy.