ASHAENA - Calea Loud Rage Music I got into the whole pagan/folk metal genre years ago to the point of being obsessive and I'm glad I did. While at the time plenty of people in the music media were making jokes about it. I ignored em and, thanks to devoted fans in the alternative music media, discovered some truly great music from Europe and elsewhere. After a few years the media stopped laughing and now cover it with respect. So I'm always on the lookout for bands in that genre from different countries I have never heard anything from. ASHAENA from Romania fits that bill. The pagan/folk metal genre is not as ridged as some believe it to be. There are various styles employed by bands from across the spectrum, some more orthodox than others. ASHAENA stands closer to the orthodox side of the genre in that they bring in lot of traditional folk instrumentation to their songs. Also their music is influenced by Romanian mythology, folklore and history. Bands that dedicate their music to keeping alive old traditions are my favorite of the whole pagan/folk metal genre. Calea is the band's second full length and it's been a good six years since their last one. There are so many cool things going on here musically. The first obvious point to make is how ASHAENA incorporates different metal styles into their overall sound whether it's melodic death, traditional metal and of course some blackened touches. Vocals are sung in both harsh/guttural and clean sounding. Strangely enough the vocals take a back seat to the instrumentation on most of this. All in all a fine release. Rating: 5/5
AKRAL NECROSIS - Underlight Loud Rage Music Hailing (literally) from Romania it's AKRAL NECROSIS who are certainly not newcomers to the whole Euro black metal scene. The band has been around for a decade, put out a couple of small format releases early in their career. Then in 2012 they released their debut full length, Pandemic Dominion, which obviously got them some acclaim as well as recording this their second album and getting signed by Loud Rage to boot. AKRAL NECROSIS's sound and style is like harsh Swedish black metal meets Eastern European pagan and folk. It took me a while to get into this or better yet, not to be jaded quickly. I do have that tendency especially when it comes to black metal. So I'm listening to the first cut "Separator" and I'm thinking ok I know what territory this is leading into, pure tremolo picked thrashy black metal. As the album continued things started to change and by the fourth cut "Exhortatio ad Bellum" I was like alright this review is gonna take a while.
After taking a step back and checking out the band's first album I can see, actually hear, that AKRAL NECROSIS has taken some of that harsh speedy blackened vibe and blended it with melody and elements of traditional metal. You know you can honestly hear the bass player on here, surprised the fuck out of me. There's also some clean guitar soloing which is starting to become a new staple of Eastern European black metal. The tortured vocals are slightly too up front in the mix for me but they're well placed.
I think one of the coolest parts to this album is how well the song structures are done. They're not just repeating tremolo blast riffs. Listen to "Purge", the longest song on the release at seven plus minutes, and you hear an intricate song switch to sludge riffage. I believe the bottom line here is that AKRAL NECROSIS have created an actual original sounding black metal release. I'm sure some hipster scribe will protest by saying "well the French were innovating in this before". No they weren't you putz. These Romanians have created something very unique and I'm glad to hear it. Rating: 5/5 http://loudragemusic.com/
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Attention
In Jan. 2020 some not so nice person(s), who obviously don't care for Metal, decided to complain to a social media platform about something I posted. That got me banned from posting links there under the former blog title Scumfeast Metal 666. Fine I just changed the name to what you see now. Hey I'm still here and, under our present day situation, will be more extreme then before.
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Extreme Metal or Music is generally a form which is accepted by 1% of all of the music loving public. It is elitist in every way and that's important to those of us who call ourselves fans. The 99% of people who will not like it are Not Supposed To. The music wasn't made for them, "the masses". It's music that's for those who take things to that "other" level. There is nothing hip or fad about it. In fact I treat those two notions very harshly.
