Thrall – Vermin to the Earth (2011)

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All the way from Australia today we have Thrall and their sophomore release “Vermin to the Earth”. Featuring seven tracks of hard hitting well-produced Black Metal, Thrall does a great job in following up their debut release “Away from the Haunts of Men”. The band plays very typical BM but with a crispier production and nice tempo changes that sometimes shake things up allowing them to not bore the listener to death.

The guitars are very well constructed and in all tracks they nicely shine due to the excellent production. The vocals are probably the most exciting part about this album since they bring that hellish scream that singers like Attila Csihar love to deliver, and they never get to high-pitched to the point of making your ears explode. In the first two tracks (“Vermin to the Earth” and “Oblivion”) we can nicely hear the tempo changes in the songs, making them less vanilla than your average BM release.

Crafting a putrid sound on songs like “Disease’s Maiming Caress”, the band nicely creates their own BM atmosphere that many other bands fail to deliver. The drumming through the release is very organic sounding, something bands have started to lose due to all the tricks they can use to make them sound more precise and punishing. Like we mentioned before, the tempo changes on tracks like “Plague of Man” keep your ears please and entertained all through the release, making the album have a high replay value.

Closing with “Vita Vacuus Voluntas”, Thrall nicely comes full circle with a fast-paced destructive track that has some nice slowdown passages. In this song we particularly enjoyed the reduced uses of vocals, allowing the music to shine by it self. The band is very good at creating different sounding Black Metal songs, but we feel that there is still something missing to push them beyond the ‘just good’ category into legendary status.

If you want some good Black Metal with nice tempo changes and demonic vocals (but nothing too crazy), you should definitely get “Vermin to the Earth”. We can only hope that Thrall keeps up the good work and experiments some more in order to fully consolidate a sound that would instantly separate them from the rest of the bands in the genre.

Band: Thrall Album: Vermin to the Earth
Label: Moribund Records

Release: October 25th, 2011

Oficial Site myspace
Genre: Black Metal

Country: Australia

Rating: 82/100
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