Alister – Red Planet

Release date: 2007,
By: Elvira Visser

  Finally I received the second EP from Alister, a band from The Netherlands.
  Their former EP recorded back in 2005, consists beautiful songs and strong guitar
  play but most of all fairytale-ish melody lines and singing from their front
  woman Brenda Van Veen. Last year I saw them perform and much to my surprise
  the band clearly developed themselves. The songs had become a lot stronger and
  had a lot more power but still it had those beautiful parts in it. Because of
  this change, and knowing they played as support act of After Forever, I was
  quite curious to hear what they recorded.

  “Red Planet” is a steady demo that takes you into the world of Alister,
  a heavy rock-ish world with jazzy and pop influences mixed with sweet vocal
  lines. Breda Van Veen is not scared to use her voice both sweet ‘n delicately
  as well as and in a rougher way. The music is progressive like Lacuna Coil and
  beautiful like Tool. Gertjan knows how to use the distortion on his guitar,
  this together with some vocal effects create the special Alister sound.

  “It’s Getting Dark” is the song that sticks in your head the most.
  The vocal line of the chorus is easy to listen to. “Red Planet” starts
  off calmly. Letting you hear the guitar skills of Gertjan and drums of Arjan.
  (after the recordings Roel van der Sluis has taken over the drumsticks) Brenda
  is clearly a great singer as she knows how to sing those high notes, but she
  also knows how to use power. “Ode” is definitely the strongest and
  most rock-ish song on the album. In most of the songs there is place for a musical
  moment to continue sometimes in an unexpected way, which makes this EP very
  varied. “Gollum” is a track that was also on their previous EP “Alister”,
  but you can hear progress and more effects added to the sound. Great song based
  on Lord of the Rings Gollum.

  The hidden track starts out with snippets of news messages. It sounds great
  but I was waiting for Brenda to start singing something emotional which seemed
  to fitted fit their sound. The hidden track is an instrumental one. Sometimes,
  more is less and the songs evolves in more building-up guitar play to end with
  those voice messages again.

  A very good EP for this young band. I am curious what it will bring them on
  their path.

Alister is:
  Brenda Van Veen
  Marnix Kauffman
  Roel Van der Sluis
  Gertjan Smit

Links:

Alister MySpace