Zebedy are described as a ‘Heavy Prog Rock 4 piece rock band from North Wales,’ and following on from their earlier albums, Marionette and Exist, they’ve just released their latest album, Waiting For The Tide. I’m unsure, though, where the term ‘prog’ derives from to describe their music because, on the evidence of this album, they’re certainly not a prog band, not as I understand the term to mean. Their music is more riff-based and focuses far more on hard rocking. There’s very little, even remotely prog about tracks like ‘Revelations’, ‘Forget All You Know’ and ‘My Name Is Forever’, with the sentiment stating “I want you to suffer but I won’t suffer you”.
Speeding up and then playing a little quieter soon after, plus stopping and starting several times in a song, doesn’t make it prog and certainly not when it’s accompanied by throat-shredding screams, which is the case with the Biffy Clyro-sounding ‘Bloom’.
They open with ‘Well Being’, a one-minute-long instrumental with a series of repeated notes, interspersed with a few electronic sounds. The next two tracks, ‘Building Sandcastles’, from which the album title comes, and ‘This City Is Ours’, alongside the closing track, ‘We Collide’, are probably the best tracks on the album, and certainly the most satisfying, in particular ‘This City’, which follows the basic outline of most good rock songs and contains some well-structured playing, plus vocals which are sung rather than screamed. ‘Set The Pace’ opens like the Beastie Boys, and the instrumental ‘Mask The Sky’ sounds like an attempt at a Dream Theatre piece but seems to flit all over the place.
For sure, there’re some good moments on Waiting For The Tide, and certain songs contain the nucleus of really positive pieces of music if they were to be approached differently and developed more fully, ‘Forget All You Know’ is an example.
