Live review from Underground Heavy #7:
Setlist:
1. Intro: Empty Kiosk
2. You Know Nothing About My Life
3. Look Who’s In the Bottle Now
4. Make Your Choice
5. Dear Jessica
Puzzle Experiment seem to be another one of those bands that is too young to have discernibly pulled away from their influences which are, as is usual, pretty cool but that fact stops the band from having a distinct sound. The band’s performance was really high-energy and fun to watch, and their sound was fun enough to get nearly any crowd going. But, musically, they’re kinda in a tough spot. They don’t seem to have figured out which metal direction they want to go in, in the feel sense. There’s hints at death metal, thrash and pop-metal all tied together loosely in a Noughties alt-metal bundle. The resulting sound is, I’m afraid, quite generic because they seem to want to play all these styles at once! On the plus side, though, they have the ability to put down some quite solid rhythms, and the tunes are ever so slightly off-centre (one of the better things about alt-metal). Plus their singer’s screaming voice sounds a lot like Mouse from Eve of Sin and has moves worthy of them too, so they have good stuff to work with; though, he might want to consider training the slightly whiney nasality out of his voice. You Know Nothing… is a perfect example of their strengths – the guitars were dissonant and yet had a lot of 70s metal feel in the solos; a nice touch. Make Your Choice was dangerously shredded through to near-perfection and was, further, from the Eve of Sin school of metal. Dear Jessica was a weird place to end on, for it’s a much slower song and in the unfortunately-Noughties metal category – too cheesy for my blood. Still, there’s promise here and I think it’s early days for these guys yet (I think they’ve just been around since the year’s second quarter)– I wish them luck in finding their sound.
— Shashwati Kala
