Earth Burnt Black – Harrowing Catharsis (2011)

With a very interesting and rich sound, today we have Earth Burnt Black’s debut full-length “Harrowing Catharsis”. The band pretty much throws everything in the frying pan and delivers a very well tasty dish of well crafted and different sounding music with a nice and clear production on top of it. These types of albums are the ones we wait for at Infernal Masquerade since the combine so many different things and still manage to sound very well and powerful.

The “Intro” track immediately gives you the feeling that this will be a Doom Metal release, but this quickly changes in the next song. “The March” features hard rocking guitars and clean vocals to start, clearly breaking away from what is expected from the intro. However, not long enough the Doom and Grooviness come back and the band delivers interesting brutal sections with both growls and screams mixed in between some more clean vocals. While this might sound completely chaotic, it actually works very well with the melodic aspect of the song.

Just before you think that you have Earth Burnt Black all figured out, “Adornment” rolls in with a very trippy and calm introductory section. This 10 minute epic is an emotional trip since it goes from calm and moody sections to an exciting fast-paced closing. “Freedom of the Wretched” and “The Hunt” continue to develop the band’s sound where they actually mix some System of a Down-style clean vocal sections paired with very intricate bass guitar lines and great riffing. It is very interesting to listen to tracks like “Lead or Cyanide” where the band keeps things a bit slow but very melodic and atmospheric without the need of keyboards.

“Vengeance & Fire” delivers the most Metal sounding track of this release in terms of guitar work and growls/shrieks, but the contrasting clean vocals nicely offset the aggression. It is very interesting to hear this band taking the core of their sound one direction, but nicely shifting it with some of the melodic and vocal passages. This in our opinion makes the band’s sound very original and interesting to listen to.

As a whole, “Harrowing Catharsis” is one hell of an album that has a little bit for everybody. The clean vocals are a bit on the mainstream/indie Rock side of things, but shrieks and growls make up for this and will still give the band some Metal rep. The guitar work is excellent and the overall structures of the songs are very well crafted and intricate in nature. We can only hope this band keeps improving and creating interesting (and diverse) sounding songs for future releases.

Release: October 29th, 2011

Country: USA