Archives: Reviews

1 - Unearthly Affinity 2 - Summoning The Swarm 3 - The Awakening Of Kumbhakarna 4 - Masked In Bloodfall 5 - End Of Ages

Impurity plays fantasic, powerful Death Metal the American way, but the American way of the early ’90s. There is brilliancy in this music and it could hardly be otherwise since the owner of Nuclear Winter records knows his stuff for sure. Main compraisons could be made to Incantation without the doomy parts, or Immolation without the obsessive demoniac riff hammering. The vocals are deep and growling, and the riffs morbidly dark, just the way Death metal is meant to be. Not only the cover art is a splendid example of torture, but the lyrics too are interersting stories about Indian Mythology (well not that original nowadays maybe). It is great to hear not all the Florida scene has moved to hypertechnical blasting. The bad aspect in this release is the running time, just below the quarter of an hour, but it has to be bought at all costs, this is cool shit.

1 - Putrid Motherload 2 - Skull-Smashing Face-Ripping Death 3 - Curse of the Plasma Hound 4 - Demon-Haunted World 5 - Witchgrip

For which unfathomable reason this band is catalogued as Black Metal is still a misery to me. Have we come to a point where the lyrics have nothing more to do with Black Metal? Becouse the distortion here sounds absolutely in the vein of Autopsy “Metal Funeral” or maybe a bit rawer, less technical, the Abscess – way. In any case this stuff is pretty decent, for being a project of Orodruin mit Danny Lilker on bass. The riffs are very loose and elementary and have a deep taste of punk slugginess and the recording is certainly demo-level but accurate, if a bit lacking of profundity. Crucifist is basically an old-school Death Metal band and the doomy element covers a good 50% of these tracks but I found contaminations of Stoner and neo-Black Metal as well on the third track in particular. In the end, when you have a band like The Ravenous and Hemlock in your roster, I wonder how much need there was of a project like this, becouse there is really nothing of added value here. The vocals are the weak spot here, raucous and a bit too flat for my tastes, but there is a good share of excellent riffs thrown in this hedgepodge of styles that comprise Autopsy, Melvins, Kyuss and whatever you can name.

1 - Disturbing The Ancients 2 - Into A Thousand Caves 3 - Tenebrarum 4 - Burn My Own 5 - Angoixa 6 - Infinity 7 - No Sense, No Life 8 - Mystic Ways 9 - 'sonhar' 10 - The Offering 11 - Despair

This is the kind of Death Metal which just does not create much enthusiasm in me. The vocals are deep and the songs all right, but it just misses “it”, there is just no great feeling here. The chemistry is near-perfect, the songs have lots of structure and the songwriting is solid, with added skill and clean recording, yet this is the kind of albums that just pass through my player as I write the review and then no more. There are some delicate signs of dissonance and even melodic chord vibrations, but in the whole, I cannot find a single hook on which to hang my attention. In a way this is the same problem I got with Oath to Vanquish. With so many fantastic bands out there, it is high improbable I could spend my money on a Cd like this, independently how chiseled it is. Well done and never banal but lacking something deep beneath.

1 - With Hate 2 - Teachings in Cruelty 3 - Black Leather Mask (The Spear Headed Avenger) 4 - Psychotic Erotic 5 - The Error That You Are 6 - Spike Swallower 7 - Futuristic Sadistic 8 - Premeditation 9 - Chloroform 10 - Thornscar Rebuttal

Shit, this is even worse than Lugubre (but not as bad as The Syre probably)! Noisy (but not incomprehesible) Black Metal of the cold, misogynist, sadistic kind, the production is desperate, in a way that all sound sound just muffled but they’re quite distict at the same time, as if filtered through bad earphones. The riffs are the cheapest, a mix of high school rock and some inspiration from the realm of dismal Black Metal. The vocals are those of Marge Simpson, but sometimes they recover a bit for just a few seconds in the realm of manliness. I doubt I would suggest this stuff to anybody, this is maybe not as completely disastrous as Cradle of Filth et similia, but we’re well below the average here.

1 - Decreasing Of Human Population 2 - Crush The Messenger Of Light 3 - Blitzkrieg 4 - Nuclear Counterstrike 5 - Smashing The Traitors 6 - Down There 7 - Depopulate This World 8 - The Final Solution 9 - Blood Must Be Shed 10 - No Title

Lugubre are a completely forgettable black metal band from Holland, with a magnificent logo disgraced by cheap bevel effects applied all over on cover. It fits them quite well, as they’re a mockery of themselves. Re-heated Black Metal of the cheapest kind, with bad but not raw sound, Simpson like vocals, pegleg drumming, and worse of all terribly banal riffs. This is the kind of “Black Metal” which could make me fall asleep on the highway. The drums are inadequate to say the least, but what kills is the complete eveness of the songs, this is stuff that can make even an Insidious Decrepancy album sound exhuberant (and that should say it all). It’s a shame how these bands sometimes pretend to tag Brutal Death Metal as boring. There is aguy with a Tsjuder shirt in the pics, and I think I remember they to sound a bit similar to this. Tsk tsk.

1 - Wrath Of The Righteous 2 - Reap The Chosen 3 - Worlds Within Worlds 4 - Silently By The Sword

The recording here is excellent to me, raw but clear, the drums being noisy but at the same time powerful in their empty-barrel sound. The definition Death/Black/Thrash fits a bit awkwardly here, as honestly I find this band to be purely Death Metal, one has to explain me why one has to call in Thrash Metal anytime there is some complex structure in a riff. The chords remind me a little bit of Watain (and henceforth, Dissection – ah ah) but the vocals are generally speaking a bit deeper and it’s the hammering drum blast beneath which keeps the songs to another level. Taken in its whole, this is a good 15 minute demo, and a quarter of an hour is the perfect length, becouse I don’t think I would gladly listen to 45 full minutes of Primal Dawn. Not that they’re bad, mind ye you dwarfs, but they just say it all in 15 minutes, period I’s not criticism. The songs are so intense, so varied they seem to last way longer than they actually do. At 3-4 minutes each it’s refreshing to hear a band being able to handle instruments and play so tight.

1 - Elemental Prisms 2 - Nature Of Descent 3 - Drowning Pisces 4 - (Tlachallel)The Arcing Obsidian 5 - Antimatter Initiates 6 - The Suicides Of Saturn 7 - Raising The Serpent

It is difficult to review this album with complete honesty because the label which released it is owned by a close friend of mine, but it’s a matter of deontological ethics to be completely honest about your reviews all the time, for me. Just as a starting note, this album has been recorded in ’99 but it was only 6 years later that it saw its release. We’re talking about a rather old band here, adept at playing some sort of atypical Death Metal with broken rhytms, screams, technical drum changes, but all the way kept heavily into mid-tempos. The few accelerations hardly stand up to the average pace of today’s bands, and anyway they’re relatively marginal, just used to add variety to songs which already have a good personality each one of them. Personally a few things sound really terrible in my ears within album however, and these are a couple of Heavy Metal riffs disguised under heavy distortion, plus some solos which are really, really mellow. I can see someone into Grand Belial’s Key to be into this band too, but it’s a scene which just doesn’t belong here. A friend of mine compared this to Bal Sagoth (ehe) but to be serious, we’re far from that. While the general feel of the album is more than good, these sing along rides and happy tarantella riffs a la Iron Maiden really feel like a cold shower the moment they fall. I have to say, this is one of the most mature, well compsoed albums you could find today, if you can stand the huge traditional Metal influence, but to me the Metal in this Death Metal album has to go.