Pathfinders are hailing from France and this is their debut full length album. This band was formed in 2018 and they called themselves after NASA´s space probe Mars Pathfinder. Like their namesake, these guys are not afraid to explore the outer fringes and expand the limits of modern metal. It is thrash metal with progressive and groove metal influences but it is so much more. This is modern metal, although I cringe a little still when I hear this term. Pathfinders play metal. Period. Guitar work is harsh, heavy and not to be joked with, but there are enough melodic and catchy guitar hooks with some atmospheric parts, almost melancholic, but then again it returns to harsher side of metal. Vocals are story for themselves. How easily they transform into screaming, return to melodic beautiful clean voice then back again to almost thrash angry shouting and growling. I love it. Songs are aggressive, yet so varied and so imaginative and well written. At times music of Pathfinders reminds me of Croatian band called Core System, yet Pathfinders are more hard and more metal and I love it. My personal highlights are: Damned Earth, Precious Star. This is a very strong debut album.
Since I was a kid growing up like twenty five or thirty years ago, I have always loved hard and extreme music, metal and hardcore was my choice. You know, when you are a defiant outlaw kid, all other music and listening to other music is considered poser and treason. But, now when I am closer to forty five years than forty, I learned to enjoy other dark music and one of the genres is also dark folk. Dark Wooden Cell are hailing from Tours area, France. This entity is comprised of two individuals, namely Mike Gory (guitar-vocals) and Bruno Marmiroli (sax/trombone). This is their sophomore album containing nine songs. The music is dark folk with neo folk and even blues influences in the song structures with rich and darkened Mike´s voice carrying us listeners through the apocalypse and ghosts that roam our surroundings and other soundscapes bringing us kind of catharsis of a darkened heart after listening to the record as a whole. Songs are orchestrated in pairs offering a unique concept and aural journey. Acoustic guitar and sax in some songs, trombone in some add to the overall melancholic feeling prevailing through the whole album. My personal favorites are: The radio, The night. If you are a fan of such music, go grab this one.
French blackened doomsters Mourning Dawn release their new record with Aesthetic Death. Hailing from Paris area, these guys deliver their music for all darkened hearts and fiends out there for years. What can we expect here? There are six songs on this beautiful opus. Songs are longer in duration but they do not get boring at all. Music of Mourning Dawn can be described as doom metal with lots of death and black metal influences, so it is safe to say if I describe it as blackened doom metal. That means slower doom sombre guitar work, rolling drums, distorted bass and sorrow and melancholy underneath the brutality. Vocals vary between growling, screaming and sometimes clean vocals depending on the atmosphere in the song structures. There are also some excursions into fast almost blast beat drums and pure black death metal parts of the songs. Lyrically they deal with personal inner battles, death, life and catharsis. My personal favorites on this one are Never Too Old To Die and Conclusion. This is a superb record to gloom your day under a steel grey sky.
KRAYKULLA-WEBZINE 