One of the most amazing things of reviewing music is the discovery of new bands. The Red Bull Bedroom Jam is an initiative to ease our search by finding bands and making sure they’re heard by a greater public. We already had the pleasure to review Guilty As Charged, who didn’t make it into the RBBJ finals, but this band has. Temptations For The Weak went the entire way and actually dominated a stage at the 2015 Graspop Metal Meeting. Not long after ‘Black Vision’, the second album by the Antwerp formation, is released, they’re here to prove they’re ready for the real deal.

And in case you wonder if Temptations For The Weak (TFTW) is good enough to play at Graspop, just check out the impression video below. The amount of people that were there to saw them play should convince you, at least a little bit. But what can we expect of ‘Black Vision’? The band itself states that if you blend together Killswitch Engage, Machine Head and Trivium, you pretty much have Temptations For The Weak. I, myself would add some Soilwork and maybe some nu-metal á la Soil in there as well.

How does that sound, you ask? Pretty good! Unfortunately the band starts on the wrong foot, because of some out of tune vocals. The grunts of Djoni Tregub are very solid and well delivered, but his cleaner sound is in need of some improvements. There’s too much going wrong in the opening tracks ‘Feed On Me’ and ‘Clear Vision’, which is an absolute shame. The first two songs should be there to convince listeners and that doesn’t exactly happen.

TFTW doing their heavy thing live on the Graspop Metal Meeting stage. Look at all those hands!

But the band makes an awesome comeback later on the record. They keep on playing their very tight metalcore meets melodic death metal. Tracks like ‘Controlled’, which opens with an amazing riff and solid drums by Timo Opdebeeck, ‘Underneath The Skin’, that holds an amazing solo, and the powerful clean vocal performance on ‘Far From Over’ really turn things around. Halfway round the album you’d almost forget that the band ever opened the way they did.

Unfortunately, there are still a couple of dubious moments on the latter parts of the record. On ‘Obey’, the clean vocals get saved by a well-placed effect that make it sound really cool. Otherwise this would have been a lesser track on the album, which, musically, it isn’t. An overall solid performance by the rhythm section, Timo Opdebeeck on drums and Geert Van Accom on bass, really convinces the listener of the quality that TFTW has.

In the end, ‘Black Vision’ is a good new effort by a enthousiastic, young, new band from Belgium. You don’t “just” win the Red Bull Bedroom Jam and the fact that Temptations For The Weak was able to release this kind of a solid album is pretty impressive. Not everything is good, especially on the vocal department, but young bands must have things to work on. They definitely have the potential to get somewhere, if they continue to impress and improve themselves. At least ‘Black Vision’ is a step in the good direction.

7,3

Released: 28th of October 2015
Record-label: Independent
Website: www.temptationsfortheweak.com
Facbook: www.facebook.com/Temptationsfortheweak

Tracklist:

1. Feed Off Me
2. Clear Vision
3. Controlled
4. Underneath The Skin
5. Trade This Life
6. Far From Over
7. Not Forsaken
8. Obey
9. In Time
10. Out Of Reach

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