Reviews
After several albums, demos, a mini cd and a picture vinyl, Lord Belial are back and this time I think they are here to stay for good. On this 8th full length the evil Swedish quartet unleash the hordes and brings winter just a breath away by delivering 10 songs of pure melodic Swedish Black Metal in its finest. The lead guitar work is excellent going further than the typical black metal paths, combining melody, intelligence and skill. The vocals are totally haunted and the drumming is destructive and sometimes unusual.
This is the debut album of Arkan based on an ethnic concept whose roots come mainly from the Moroccan and Algerian music cultures, blended into a death metal basis. Apart from the stable death metal riffing you can hear some folkloric instruments such as oud, mandolin, bendir, derbouska etc. The vocals are shared between the growler Florent Jannier and the lead guitarist Abder Abdellahoum who does the clean and melodic ones. The band plays very well and the songs have the instrumental richness that is needed to take the listener to a trip in Arabic and African places.
\r\nFor those who may hear time the name Jennifer Batten for the first time it takes a quick look over the Internet to get information regarding her musical background. An extended CV follows her career up to date, which refers to many influences and has many important spots as well. A very experienced musician who is in the music industry for many years. These elements, however, are a bit general so let’s focus on the album that we got here.
Blood Ceremony are a Canadian band which clearly state their musical intentions through their first release with Rise Above Records.
\r\n "Conforming To Abnormality" was the debut album from Cephalic Carnage released in 1998 on Headfucker featuring at the time a weird mixture of grindcore, sludge, hardcore and doom metal with technical guitars, insensate drum lines, electro and avant-garde elements, violent vocals and jazz harmonies Ten years later it is re-issued by Relapse in a remixed, remastered and repackaged version with 21 bonus tracks including the Split CD "Perversion...and the Guilt After/Version 5 Obese&
\r\nSpinefarm is a pretty big label to me… Just scan the list of the bands represented by them to realize the role they have in the melodic-atmospheric scene’s growth.. Shallow the Sun come from Finland, as many of the bands of the label and Plague of Butterflies is their last release just after summer’s end, pretty good time to make things a bit colder.
After their 19 year separation, not the original, but almost the complete "Remnants of War" line up, of Helstar reformed in 2006 (the 20th anniversary) and announced that they would start touring. From this line up only drummer Rene Luna was missing. Since then they have offered us, through the same label, a collection of the band’s favourite classic songs re-recorded with
\r\nCustom Made Noise comes from Thessaloniki (Hellas) and they present to us their first sample of work, which contains four tracks and as things show it is one more hopeful effort coming from a new band, which worth paying attention to. What I liked the most. The furious vocals, the raw guitars and the impressively tied up rhythm section, which, combined with a very good production and in general an extremely professional attitude, result in burning your brain out. Brutality, musical “brinkmanship” and vocals that can drive you insane.
\r\n So, the time has come and the frontman of the once mighty Emperor is releasing his second solo album "Angl". His previous release "The Adversary" featured Ihsahn’s return to the symphonic black metal, after his avant-gard trips with his wife’s project Peccatum, although with many progressive and melodic elements and a much larger diversity and experimentation even from the latest Emperor musical escapades.
\r\n I suppose even from the name of this band, if you don’t already them, you understand the kind of metal that we are dealing here with. Blood, rape and sexual perversion what else could you remind you of than the beloved and always likeable Cannibal Corpse (of course generally speaking)!!! So, Brutal death metal it is, with gore lyrics and one more release from Neurotic Records.