Impiety - Ravage & Conquer
This album might have been good but for two things. The first is that the drums are far, far, too loud. They drown out the guitars to the point where all you hear is snare drum. The second thing that hinders this album is the fact that the songs, especially the first six tracks, are far too long. When you’re playing War Metal in the Blasphemy / Bestial Warlust style, the best formulation for a song is short and sweet. You hit fast and hard, musically speaking. An eight-minute War Metal song is four and a half minutes too fucking long. When you put the two downsides together, you get an album that drags on far longer than it should. The drumming is repetitive and since it drowns out the guitars most of the time, it makes the songs repetitive by default. The only time you can really hear the guitars clearly is when the drummer stops riding the snare for a moment, something that only happens for a short while in each song. This album doesn’t totally suck, but the downsides make it very hard to listen to all the way through. The strongest element on Ravage & Conquer is the guitar soloing. There are some really sick solos on this album. I mean, they just shred. I’m not a big fan of guitar solos (or guitar wankery in general) but the soloing here made me sit up and take notice. They don’t save the album but they do keep it from entering “absolute crap” territory. I can forgive the longer songs if they are interesting. I could see where they tried to inject some additional soloing and changes to spice things up, but the overly loud snare drum killed it. I don’t care how much your drummer whines about his shit getting buried. Metalheads like guitars. If we wanted to hear drumming, we’d listen to Rap. Turn the fucking snare down and turn up the guitars!
(1) Comment(s)
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Kalashnyx said:
I like the music on this album, even if the songs do err to the long side, but I totally agree with you on the production. Fucking over compressed, cliptastic, and the drums sound plastic as hell. With a good, raw production, this could have been a hell of a contender. As it is, it’s a cool war metal album with some annoying flaws.
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