Tethra - Drown Into the Sea of Life (2013)

With a very traditional Death/Doom Metal sound, today we have Italy’s Tethra and their debut full-length release “Drown Into the Sea of Life”. Featuring nine tracks of engaging tracks that bring back memories of the genre’s heyday we have some serious My Dying Bride worship on our hands with this one.

After the intro track, “Sense of The Night” brings forth the goods with some solid clean vocals as the track transforms with some Doom riffs and tight drumming. The song structure is quite typical, and while not revolutionary is quite sufficient. The band’s melancholic presence is felt in the trio of songs “Drifting Islands”, “Vortex Of Void” and “Drown Into the Sea of Life”, featuring a wide variety of catchy riffs, memorable guitar leads, and a very well structured core.

Perfectly pacing things with an interlude track to slow things down and change the mindset of the listener, the Doom onslaught continues with the powerful “Ocean of Dark Creation”. This song will turns some heads around with the inclusion of female vocals that nicely shift the band’s sound into different territories (Gothic/Death/Doom Metal, Draconian style), at least for a moment. The same thing happens on their epic closing track “End of the River”.

Sounding like a mixture of My Dying Bride and the Foreshadowing, Tethra has the basics of the genre down, but they are missing a bit of a spark that would set them apart from the rest. It is great to hear that there is still interest from bands to play ‘old-school’ Death/Doom Metal without the need of ridiculous amounts of keyboards or atmospheric elements, and Tethra does a great job at it. If you are feeling nostalgic for Death/Doom releases of the late 90’s, this is one album that you should get your hands on.

Label: House of Ashes Productions

Release: 2013

Genre: Death/Doom Metal

Country: Italy