Rusty Eye
Live at The Rainbow MMX
Epoche Records
Note to Rusty Eye: Calling your live album a “sonic documentary” is unnecessarily pretentious, especially if you’re already a moderately well-respected underground horror-metal act with an awesome multi-camera gimmick on its website (rustyeye.com – seriously, check it out). Although suffering from the questionable recording quality (the band calls it “D.I.Y.,” but it may well be closer to “bootleg”), the second live album from the LA-based trio works hard to consolidate the best elements from the group’s canon, including songs from it’s 2005 Cryogenic EP and it’s latest, Possessor (disappointingly, sans Goblin’s Claudio Simonetti, who played on the album the track “Wings of a Demon”). The band’s passion for horror culture aside, these performances are occasionally loose, while basically re-treading familiar ground. Inevitably, this comes off as an unsolicited vanity project from a band that still needs to refine its sonic identity.
