Tigers of Junction Street - Tigers of Junction Street

Tigers of Junction Street are a rock n roll band composed of five members. They draw influence from Periphery, Coheed and Cambria, Protest the Hero and TesseracT. I am a fan of a few of those groups, so I was excited to check this out.

The instrumentation does start in the rock genre but leans in the metal direction. You get some really distorted guitars, playing some killer riffs and throwing in some pinch harmonics here and there to help punctuate said riffs. The drumming is nice throughout, though I wish there were more times where it took a front seat. They do this well on 'The Deception', on which the drumming has it all: speed, technical prowess and some nice finesse to hold it all together.

The bass does a good job of filling in the bottom end of the sound but doesn't really stick out in either a good or bad way. It would have been nice to either showcase the bass at times or give it a chance to solo. The singing falls a little more toward the pop-metal genre. At times, it sounds a bit too whiney for my taste but there were some well thought-out lyrics.

My favorite thing about this record is the compositions themselves. They show a great blend of influences. The riffs come fast at times, slower and more melodic at others, ebbing and flowing well through the course of this EP.

It's hard to imagine what a full-length from them would sound like, but I would be interested in checking it out. This EP flowed well from track to track. The prodution was handled nicely; everything fits together well, which is sometimes difficult to accomplish in the metal genre. All in all, if you are a fan of some harder-rocking pop music, you should check this out.