When the intro to British band OTHER EYES WISE's new album, "Chapters" rolled into the first track, "Broken Path", my only response was to stare at my media player (which is Winamp, to all you WMP hippies) and mutter "you have my attention".

The music itself is pretty straightforward but wonderfully layered - with seemingly nonrelated parts joined wonderfully together. Think MIKE OLDFIELD for metalheads. Heavy palm-muted low-growled verses give way to more melodic clean-sung choruses, with very spacey interludes throughout. No guitar solos to speak of, but the music is so well constructed they don't feel missing as you're engrossed in the sea of shifting patterns laid out before you.

Two things I liked the most with the record:

Firstly, it's really "out there" when it comes to genre. It has the heavy palm-muted-growled verses leading to melodic clean-sung choruses of the more pop-death-metal genres, the heaviness of doom and stoner, clean guitar parts that might feel more at home in a soft rock record and everything inbetween - but most importantly, all of those feel like a single work of art! None of that "yeah let's overdub tracks of some different genres and see what happens" feel that most songs the "defy genre" have here, boys!

Secondly, the rhythm section is simply wonderful to listen to. The norm with most new stuff I get to hear is "yah man we got this heavy as fuck tube amp distorted beyond any recognition, guitars tuned so low we use elephant dicks as strings and our drummer double-bass-kicks so hard all the time we've got a never ending carpet of kick-drums over everything! Great!" Not here, though. While the guitars are without a doubt heavier-'n-yo'-mama, they took it relatively low on the gain so you can actually hear note definition, and the drummer's grooves hit you right where they should - resulting in a massive sound with a huge dynamic range to build your the band's amazing lead-work on.

A huge improvement from their last work, the entire album feels like a single work - with the songs flowing effortlessly from one to the other, and taking you with them.  It is possible of course to listen to the album in pieces, but the experience to me is much greater as a whole - and that whole has pretty much been the soundtrack to my life for the last couple of days.