Domino
Where the Desert Meets the Sea
Reviewed by Joe Tingle
Domino’s first full length album, the aptly titled Where the Desert Meets the Sea, is an energetic and, at times, mesmerizing work that embodies both the Avant Garde spirit of metal, as well as the genre’s numerous clichés.
While the band certainly has strengths lyrically, and benefits greatly from a competent rhythm section that handles the album’s many “eastern rhythm” sections with relative finesse, I feel that Where the Desert Meets the Sea could have benefited from greater stylistic diversity. While compositions here are solid, and vocalist Erica Bowron proves she can belt with the best singers of the genre, the album’s Arabian motifs spread a wee bit too thin for this listener. Ultimately, the album suffers from good songs that sound too much like each other, even to the extreme that it is often difficult to tell one song from the next. Like footprints covered by desert sand, it is difficult to tell where one has been.
