At War - Retaliatory Strike
I absolutely love that New Renaissance is reissuing all this old stuff! The timing is good, too, with the reemergence of Thrash and all. This album sounds just as good now as it did when originally released in 1988. It’s a real lesson to current bands that Thrash can be intense. If you missed this the first time out, I’d suggest that all fans of bands like Destruction check it out immediately.
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Ashen Light - Nechb Beneca
[The Russian title of this album looks like Nechb Beneca, but is better transliterated as Pesn’ Velesa, which means Veles’ Song. -Editor]
From Russia with more hate (if you’ll excuse the pun) comes Ashen Light and if you love Graveland and Nokturnal Mortum, you’re sure to like this band as well. This five-piece sounds a bit young when it comes to musical maturity and it’s immediately noticeable that the keyboards are the dominant instrument here. In fact, I kind of wonder why they bother including guitars in many places. The reason I wonder about that is because the keyboards drown them out so much that if these guys are playing actual riffs or just playing the same chord over and over again, you’d never really know for sure. The biggest problem with this album is that none of the songs really reached out and throttled me half to death. They’re all pretty good and the playing is fairly competent but they all follow a derivative song structure where you can - if you really have nothing better to do with your time - predict where and when certain change-ups occur. Nechb Beneca isn’t the greatest album to come out of Eastern Europe, but Ashen Light has my attention and I’ve put them on my watch list. If they can get a better sound and incorporate their obvious Slavic Folk influences more into their songs (instead of overlaying it over noisy guitars by playing them on the keyboards that overpower everything else), then you’ll be able to mention them in the same breath as the previously mentioned Graveland and Nokturnal Mortum without people asking you who the fuck they are.
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Asgaroth - Absence Spells Beyond…
After the intro, we get right into the symphonic Black Metal. It’s very well done, and actually pretty catchy. As a bonus, you also get the band’s entire 1997 Trapped in the Depths of Eve… album as extra tracks on the CD. That makes the disc a must, if you ask me.
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Ascension - Abomination
Very intense Hardcore, sometimes bordering on Death Metal. It’s interesting, and pretty well done most of the time, but every now and then they get off track. I’m looking forward to hearing what they think they have to “fix” for their next album, as that will really tell the tale.
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Art Inferno - Abyssvs Abyssvm Invocat
Under most circumstances, I give clone bands a real hard time. No matter how good you can play, you won’t score any higher than a 7 if you blatantly ape your main influence without adding anything new, different or original anywhere in your compositions. That being said, I guess you can figure out that Art Inferno blatantly copies somebody famous. Yes, sad but true, Art Inferno is a Cradle of Filth clone. Not a total clone, which means that their rating will be a tad higher than a blatant, shameless rip-off, but a clone none the less. You get extremely high-pitched banshee wailing a-la Dani Filth, lots of atmospheric keyboard bits in the Cradle of Filth style, female vocal parts, spoken word passages and assorted other Cradle-isms. They do add some twists on the Cradle formula, adding more straight out symphonic pieces, a New Age bit that reminded me strongly of Jim Kirkwood (who did the Asatru inspired album Hammer of the North), some female choir work that sounded nothing like Sarah Jezebel Diva and instrumental segments that are truly interesting. If you like Cradle of Filth and just can’t wait for more of the same, Art Inferno is a fairly close substitute. I wish they would have injected more of their own personalities into this. I’m sure that they are good musicians - you have to be good to pull off Cradle of Filth to this degree - but why copy someone so closely? There are some good, original bits on here but not enough to set them apart as a band forging their own destiny.
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Arcturus - Disguised Masters
This is an album of remixes, reconstructions, and other oddities. Some of them are even pretty good, but some are just examples of what happens when you try too hard to be “artistic” and “different.” To paraphrase Dr. Freud, sometimes shit is just shit.
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Arch Enemy - Burning Bridges
Intense Thrash from this “supergroup,” with some bits of Traditional Metal bursting through every now and then. By the way, Sharlee D’Angelo must never get any rest - I think he’s in about 6 bands.
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Anwyl - Bloody Mary
This band is definitely a contender in the Unreadable Band Logo category, as it looks evil and Satanic (lots of inverted crosses, demon horns and such) but leaves you wondering just where you get the letters to spell the band’s name amidst all that Satanic imagery. Anwyl plays a rather under-produced style of Blackened Death Metal that is definitely in the need of help in the sound clarity department. The problem is not that their songs suck or that they lack ability. This is not the case. Yes the songs are a bit primitive but hey, I’ve heard tons worse. The lyrics are kind of dopey in the “Kill Your Momma for Satan” kind of way, and songs about raping the Virgin Mary are most certainly old hat. The problem that Anwyl suffers from the most is the fact that everything sounds like it was recorded underwater. The guitars don’t suffer so much but both the vocals and the drums have that muffled flange. To top things off, the guitars are not loud enough to keep from being buried underneath the snare when the blast segments cut in. There are times on Bloody Mary that sound so muddled that you just give up trying to follow the song and let the chaos run rampant for a few seconds before the snare cuts out. With a better, clearer sound, this would have been 1000 times better. The net result of this, however, is nothing to write home about. Nor would I recommend chasing this one down unless you have to own everything.
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Antropofagus - No Waste of Flesh
As much as I love brutal Gore bands like Disgorge, Sublime Cadaveric Decomposition, Inhume, and Incestuous, now we have to deal with tenth rate copycats like this godawful piece of shit band. It’s as if finding some really gory cover art and some samples that every band in the universe has already used twice is half the battle! Antropofagus’ brutality is mere noise. The songs go by like a blur, crafted without a trace of delicacy or rhythm. But the cover’s totally gory, dude!!
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