Silencer at Myspace

The first time I heard Silencer, it reminded me of going to my first few metal shows. Those shows were loud, indecipherable and full of aggression. But I was so swept up in the adrenaline and the energy in the room that it didn’t matter too much who was on stage, as long as they were loud and fast. It could’ve been a shitty local band with some pseudo-medical, genital related name like “Vaginitus” or “Penile Immolation” and I wouldn’t have cared, simply because the experience was so exhilarating.

But as you go to more shows, the novelty begins to wear and you start to look for flaws, like how you might notice protruding nose hairs on your girlfriend when all you used to see were her tits.

When I first heard Silencer, I was taken by their relentless riffing, catchy hooks and heartfelt aggression. Songs like Mnemodrone and The Harvest are the kind of things that makes you think back to your first show, in all its sweaty, drunken glory.

Unfortunately, the act grows stale pretty quickly. The speeding guitars and thrashing drums start to sound repetitive and—let’s face it— singer Chad Armstrong isn’t doing much to stoke the coals with his generic but serviceable screams.

That’s not to say this is a bad record, it’s just fairly typical death metal with a twist of thrash. I won’t skip it if it comes up on shuffle, but I’m not going to seek out a Silencer song.

Why you should listen to it
Catchy hooks and waves of guitars make Silencer a nice band to blast when you feel like being an asshole at red lights, solid musicianship and production.

Why you shouldn’t listen to it
Repetitive songs, that wave of guitars starts to feel like maple syrup after awhile, bland vocals adds some staleness and redundancy.

6.5/10

(For Samples Click Artwork)

The Berzerker at Myspace

“The Reawakening” marks The Berzerker’s fourth studio album and also his first, truly, independent release.  After the release of “Animosity”, Luke Kenny was apparently very disillusioned by Earache Records, and the entire record industry as a whole, and decided to create his own record label for his music; he even posted a small movie on how the profits in the music industry is really distributed.  In reality, this is no surprise because the current state of the recording industry is at the weakest state its ever been with everyone having home recording equipment and software that could literally master an album in no time with little to no money needed.  But that is a topic of another time, the music of The Berzerker is really what matters and on this record, he comes out with more force, more focus, and more creativity than he ever has in his last few records.
The album starts off with “Wisdon and Corruption” features a more gabber flavor than his last two albums; not to say that the last few albums were crap or unfocused but the idea of “The Berzerker” was to create a living Death/Gabber band and he did achieve it on “Dissimulate” but the idea can sometimes cloud the creativity or uniqueness of the art.  This album is actually more “artful” than “World of Lies” and “Animosity” put together because Luke decided to not hide his Gabber/DnB side and instead incorporate it into the music.  I, personally, think what he achieved on this record is what he was trying to do with all the albums but maybe the record label wanted a more “conventional” sounding electronic death metal act.

Honestly, after “Animosity”, I thought The Berzerker was going a bit stale because his idea of trying to make the fastest, brutal death metal band/album and when you compare “World of Lies”, “Animosity”, and “Dissimulate” you hear someone trying to create/program drums that are 150x faster than any human drum can create and to a degree it works but after a few attempts, and possibly rehashing of the same patterns, the art of music gets lost.

So when I first heard “The Reawakening”, I was blown away that this record a pattern or structure that made some sense given the music.  The guitars are still ever fast/Carcass-est but the focus on the drums was actually a HUGE breath of fresh air because Luke changed the patterns, for example “Disassembly Line” features a short DnB pause that helps build the song and carries it through force.  The song “Your Final Seconds” starts off with fast Gabber kicks but suddenly stops and goes almost “Breakcore-ish” and then returns to its Industrial Grind.  These little changes and additions to the song structure are the things that made the first Berzerker album soo standout.  In 2000, the self titled masterpiece of “The Berzerker” opened my ears to a new sound in Death Metal and I think was the first, focused example of creativity and imagination being used to recreate a genre that is so set in its own ways.

So what more can I say about this album more than its refreshing to hear this band return to its roots and imagination.  One thing I forgot to mention about this record was that it features, for the first time in the bands history actually, remixes from fans and fellow hardcore techno artists that Luke Kenny has known for sometime.  The promotion for the album began with a songwriting campaign, very similar to Trent Reznor’s Year Zero Remixed campaign, that allowed fans to remix one or two of his songs in anyway that they envisioned it.  Also, the band would choose their favorite remix and the fans would choose theirs and both would end up on the album, which they did.  So not only is this Luke’s best “Berzerker” album but also his gift to fans by giving some of them a chance to appear on a release of this magnitude.

For purchasing information, go to www.berzerkerindustries.com and get the album and the newly released 12″ with bonus remixes.

Amaseffer at Myspace

Israel’s best known metal export, Orphaned Land, is notorious for the paucity of its releases. When they released Mabool, their best known effort, in 2004, their previous album had been eight years prior, and their next album still has not surfaced. So it’s fortunate that Amaseffer has stepped in to fill the void. Their first album, Slaves for Life, sounds more than a little like Mabool, but with more emphasis on symphonic keyboards. It is intended to be the first in a trilogy of albums about the story of the Israelites in the Old Testament.

The band had difficulty finding a vocalist, but they managed to get Mats Leven of Therion to perform most lead vocals, and Angela Gossow of Arch Enemy guests on one track. I was originally shocked that Amaseffer had allowed goyim to perform on this album, but it didn’t matter because Leven’s performance was quite good. If Slaves for Life has any real weaknesses, it’s that at 77 minutes and 45 seconds, it goes on a little longer than it should. The song “Midian” also used a horse whinny at about eight minutes in which I’d heard in so much stuff that it’s basically the equine version of the Wilhelm Scream. This is a quality release and I heartily recommend it.

Stormwarrior at Myspace

I love Stormwarrior. They do a great job of producing 80’s style speed metal in a way that’s delightfully cheesy without falling into the outright faggotry embraced by Hot Topic favorites such as Dragonforce. Heading Northe is another fine effort from the band. It’s hard to believe that this is just the third full-length studio effort from these guys; they’ve firmly established their sound. Things do get a little samey at points, but not as much as you’d think.

My favorite song on the album was “The Holy Cross,” a seven-minute epic telling about how the narrator will never give in to the foreign religion that is invading his land. (I would also like to state that my enjoyment of this song has nothing to do with the recent spate of church burnings in my area that started just after I first heard this album.) I also liked the fact that the band has gone out of their way not to include historically inaccurate horned helmets on any of its album covers.

I do have to address one thing. You probably noticed that extra E in the album title. Well, they randomly include them throughout the song titles and even in the lyrics booklet. It’s silly, but at least they didn’t have all the liner notes written in runes like Manowar did on their last album, and it doesn’t take away from the actual music one bit.

Dantesco at myspace

Dantesco, Puerto Rico’s premier metal band play a form of epic doom metal not a million miles from Doomsword, Solstice and Solitude Aeturnus. The first thing you will notice is they are all in Spanish and that vocalist Erico La Bestia sings for a good portion of the time in a cod-operatic style that somewhat distracts from the music. It’s hard to get into any sort of metal with someone sounding like Pavarotti singing over the top of it. The performance and composing of the music is top notch, but it’s impossible to get past a vocalist who by rights should be singing in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and it’s not coincidence that the bonus track on this album is actually taken from one!

The guitarwork is immensely soulful and provocative and with another vocalist I could probably get into this a lot more, but La Bestia’s vocals which when they aren’t operatic, sound like a parrot attempting falsetto, simply don’t work in Metal. Operatic vocals are for opera and nothing else really by the evidence of this record.