Upon listening to Iodine Sky’s debut album Tides, you’ll find yourself sandwiched between heavy riffs with melodic overtones and metal-core style breakdowns with smatterings of Alter Bridge and A Day To Remember to keep things interesting. The opening song Broken Cross certainly does not hesitate to make an impression and definitely is an attention grabber with its barrage of drum heavy sounds making way for complex guitars and melodic vocals, making an extremely strong opening track to the album. The initial opening tracks make way for a far softer track in the shape of Down Over Me full of romantic, inspirational lyrics in where you can almost feel the emotion in this song, producing what I feel is the stand-out track of the album. This leads through to gentle piano melodies which contrasts beautifully with the heavy backing guitars.
The albums namesake Tides is a punch in the face after the latter, albeit, an enjoyable punch in the face, reminiscent of old school Bullet For My Valentine, where fast, layered guitars and harmonies of backing vocals take control of the song leading it into a crescendo which rapidly drops into guitar solos leading the song to a triumphant close. Layering sweet sounding guitar melodies over synth harmonies follows Eyes Wide Open a song that’s practically built for mosh-pits!
Closing with Summer Song with gentle, almost relaxing sound to it, is reminiscent of the end of summer and almost brings to mind memories of walking along a beach at the close of summer, made all the sweeter by the contrast to the rest of the album, creating an unusual but fitting end to what is a strong debut album from Iodine Skies. I for one will be looking forward to hearing what else they have to offer.
(7/10)