From Upper Austria comes Todesschrei, with their first full length opus. This one contains eight songs with titles and lyrics in German language and the music of Todesschrei is basically a mixture of raw anguished black metal and slower more depressive black with songs such as Im Herbst meines Lebens, Der Tod ruft mich, Mein letzter Weg giving good picture what this opus is about. Production is old school, raw yet atmospheric with aggression giving enough place to melancholy and guitar melody possible only in black metal. Vocals are screaming and tortured but fit perfectly. My personal favorite of all eight songs is Dem Wahn verfallen which starts with wolf’s howl and wind and is the most atmospheric song and melancholic yet aggressive song on this record. This is a strong debut.
Niederwelt are an entity hailing from Saxony, Germany and this is their second full length opus. This one contains kind of intro plus six songs. The music is raw black metal but with lots of atmospheric parts, slower doomy rolling parts and tortured screams mixing with angry screaming, whispering, even coughing in awesome and desperate Cult Of The Rising Moon. This may be called depressive black metal, but it is in fact atmospheric black with doom elements. Lyrics are in English and deal with apocalypse, surviving after the destruction, personal fighting with inner demons through prism of entity who questions its own humanity. Songs are rather long but they do not get boring in any case. One of my personal favorite is aggressive and blasting From The Ashes, which reminded me a lot of old school nineties Norse black metal influences, especially old Mayhem, circa Deathcrush era. But, for me the most epic on this opus is Reincarnation, long epic song with ritualistic guitar melody, thundering drums, chanting monk like clean vocals and that old school production and vibe that many black metal bands lack these days. Repetition Of Sins slows down things a bit into more doomy regions but it is such a powerful guitar riff coupled with vocal growls. Great stuff. Not to discover just all, check this one out!
You may say what you want but Darkthrone are explorers. Besides being black metal legends who released couple of milestone albums in black metal genre they decided to explore metal and musical boundaries and not giving a fuck what anybody thinks about that. Main occupation of Darkthrone’s music last couple of years is 80ies metal with Fenriz being an absolute encyclopedia of metal and underground. For me personally, the best phase in last couple of years of so, was more melodic punky crust phase with Circle The Wagons coming to mind immediately. On to this opus. This one contains seven songs, with one called Koboltn, West Of The Wast Forests being eerie piano synth instrumental. On this opus Darkthrone mix eighties metal with doom metal slower side of things but retaining enough melody in guitar riffs to keep songs interesting and good listening. My personal favorites are Eon 2 having such nice main guitar melody, also Kevorkian Times. There are no blast beats on this album, but there are synth parts smartly thrown in some songs, also acoustic atmospheric parts and varied yet hypnotic riffing topped with Nocturno Culto’s trade mark voice. Maybe it takes couple of listenings to get to love this album, but once you do it, it is superb like all Darkthrone releases.
KRAYKULLA-WEBZINE 