2010

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    Thy Disease – Anshur-Za (2009)

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    With a very unconventional sound today we have Thy Disease, a Polish band that will surely turn heads when you are blasting this release through your car stereo or out in your back yard. Starting off a second place finish in Poland’s “Metal Millennium Party” back in 1999, Thy Disease has released 5 full-length albums in over 10 years and it’s finally making its way to America through Armoury Records.

    With a very rich mixture of elements in their music, Thy Disease will surely make an impact as one of the bands with one of the most interesting styles in the Metal scene these days. In “Anshur-Za”, the band combines Death/Black Metal elements with some Industrial/Electronic sounds and some interesting chorus sections (featuring clean vocals) that will surely make you scratch your head more than one.

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    Votum – Metafiction (2010)

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    As soon as we saw that Votum’s second full-length album was promoted for fans of Opeth, Anathema and Porcupine Tree, we immediately took out the CD from its packaging and started listening to this promising release. To our surprise, Votum actually delivers on the promise of being compared to the previously mentioned legendary bands.

    Hailing from Poland, Votum has been around since 2002 and (from what we have heard) has been evolving from Heavy Metal into the mystical genre of Progressive Metal/Rock in the last years. We immediately identify with Votum’s music since it’s well crafted and atmospheric enough to draw our attention away from whatever else we are doing while reviewing music (playing MW2 mostly).

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    Burden of Grief – Follow the Flames (2010)

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    When we first got this promo album all tracks where garbled up with the bonus CD of the limited edition version that contains 8 cover tracks. While listening to this promo, we would get one song from the actual “Follow the Flames” album and the next one would be a totally random cover song, making this band seem bipolar or something like that. Now that we have arranged them correctly, we hear that Burden of Grief plays a very mean Melodic Death Metal, and that the cover CD is VERY different from what this band is actually capable off.

    There are countless of Melodic Death Metal bands these days and it’s hard to find good new bands that will stick together for the long run and make decent music in the process. This is where Burden of Grief comes in, the band has released 4 albums in a span of ten years and seem to be constant enough to not be going anywhere anytime soon.

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    Doomshine – The Piper at the Gates of Doom (2010)

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    Epic Doom Metal is a genre that has been getting little to no attention in the last few years. With only sparse releases by While Heaven Wept, Candlemass, and others, we can count with two hands the albums that have been released in the last 2 years. Doomshine hailing from Sweden adds their contribution to the mix with a crushing release names “The Piper at the Gates of Doom”.

    As you can expect from any Epic Doom Metal release, chugging down-tempo riffing, epic singing and tight drumming is exactly what the doctor ordered. Doomshine pretty much excels in every single department and created 73 minutes of crushing music that will please even the pickiest fans of Candlemass and similar bands.

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    Yaotl Mictlan – Dentro del Manto Gris de Chaac (2010)

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    Yaotl Mictlan has always been one of the most interesting bands that we have ever heard to come out of Mexico. With a mixture of indigenous Aztec and Mayan elements, the band crafts their Death/Black Metal with a ‘folk-ish’ aspect, but the end result is something that you wouldn’t expect. The band’s sound is indeed very heavy and just uses these elements to highlight parts of their songs, not to revolve around them.

    In these days, every band out there has to have a gimmick in order to be successful (or have ridiculously good musicians), and Yaotl Mictlan’s indigenous gimmick is what actually makes them stand out from countless average Death/Black Metal bands in the world. However, this gimmick is not just for show purposes since the band spends quite a good deal of effort to make their lyrics historically relevant and incorporate part of their heritage into their music.

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    Lustre – A Glimpse of Glory (2010)

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    Hailing from Sweden, Lustre (one man band) brings us his second full-length release with “A Glimpse of Glory”. Mixing Ambient elements with the raw beauty of Atmospheric Black Metal, we get a very solid release that instantly became one of our top 10 releases of 2010 so far. During the 40 minutes of “A Glimpse of Glory”, Lustre reminded us of bands such as Enid, Blut aus Nord, Velvet Cacoon, etc. combined with the ethereal nature of artists like raison d'être and Robert Rich.

    Each of the three tracks found in “A Glimpse of Glory” focuses more in creating a very enthralling atmosphere than on the ‘Black Metal’ aspect of things. There are distorted guitars through most of the album (two thirds maybe), but there is only a little section (on track one) that has harsh BM screams. We didn’t even care if anybody was singing since each song crafts a mysterious atmosphere that gave us chills while listening to them at night.

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    Sicarus – Strength of All (2010)

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    Today we find ourselves listening to yet another band mixing Metalcore influences with something else. While this would usually mean that we start laughing from the beginning till the end of the band’s release, we actually find ourselves quite impressed with the solid effort put by Sicarus on their debut EP “Strength of All”.

    Sicarus main strength lies behind the guitar acrobatics that Mad Scotsman and Jon provide the band with. We can make some comparisons with Into Eternity, Echoes of Eternity, Mutiny Within, etc. in this department, but the band does a great job at crafting a sound that does not rely on them too much (unlike the previously mentioned bands).

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    Liv Kristine – Skintight (2010)

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    First of all we have to disclose that we are HUGE fans of Liv Kristine and we have loved almost every thing she has ever released in her career, until now. “Skintight” shows the desperation of an artist trying to break into ‘mainstream’ music. With Leaves’ Eyes and Atrocity being highly popular and very different musical outlets you would image that such a quality singer like Liv would have enough.

    Since 1998, Liv has been releasing stuff promoting her solo career. We loved “Deus Ex Machina” since it was a nice break from her main gig back in those days (Theater of Tragedy) and it featured some nice folk-ish songs with some other pop-ish material mixed in between. Not much came of this (except in Norway) and she went back to releasing ToT albums until she got the boot in 2003. And we feel that her best chance at ‘mainstream’ commercial success was with “Musique” and “Assembly”, some electronic/techno oriented albums that shined with her vocals.

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    Tristania – Rubicon (2010)

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    Tristania has always been one of our favorite bands since the late 90’s with their impressive “Widows Weeds” and “Beyond The Veil” albums. Fast forward to the mid 00’s and we have that Morten Veland left the band and Tristania was stuck in a creative limbo releasing somewhat dull and uninspired releases. Lastly in 2007 we got Illuminate, and album that was somewhat decent and marked the last release of the band with Vibeke Stene, the band’s iconic Female singer. Many people gave Tristania for dead after Vibeke left and not a lot of people had confidence that the band would ever return with release solid enough to get them back on top of the Gothic Metal world.

    With “Rubicon”, Tristania proves us all wrong (yes, including us). The band’s latest release is as great as we could have ever expected, not like Morten Veland would have done (for this check out Mortemia), but like the ever shape-shifting Tristania only knows how to do: it’s complex, powerful and well designed to keep the listener engaged. With the band’s new female singer Mary Demurtas, we get a more than worthy replacement for Vibeke. Mary’s voice is indeed different than Vibeke, but it has enough power and range to helm Tristania’s female singer crown gracefully.

    • Posted By: Dark Emperor
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    Helstar - Rising From The Grave (2010)

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    Today we have the Metal Blade re-release of legendary Helstar’s albums: “A Distant Thunder”, “Nosferatu” and “Twas the Night of a Helish X-Mas” is a boxed set that also includes the DVD of “Twas the Night of a Helish X-Mas”. For those of you that don’t know Helstar is a Power/Speed Metal band from the USA that released some epic albums back in the 80’s before disappearing for a while.

    All these three releases featured in the “Rising From The Gave” boxed set feature remastered versions of “A Distant Thunder” and “Nosferatu” and indeed these two great albums sound better than ever. We did not receive the 3rd and live CD for review, so we can’t really say much about this part of the boxed set.

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