after one week of no activities due to my holiday in Munich (with also a visit to the concentratrion camp of Dachau), today there are some new reviews to read about two interesting bands. Both comes from Czech Republic and each of them have a completely different approach to conceive the death metal genre. Let me know what is your favorite approach but, surely, you will discover the mine only by reading these articles, so...
ENJOY THEM AND STAY TRVE!!!
Band: Awrizis
Title: Dreadful Reflection
Genre: Melodic Death Metal with various Extreme Metal influences
Time: 35 min
Year: 26th March 2018
Rating: 70/100
Awrizis...what a very strange moniker! But also their sophomore album "Dreadful Reflection" is a bit strange! Born in 2011 as a deathcore band influenced by In Flames, Suicide Silence and Machine Head, Awrizis plays now a kind of chameleon and very modern death metal in which there is a melting pot of various extreme metal genres, so to range from black metal ("I Am") to groove metal ("From Pain to Strenght"). Incredibly, these 4 guys are able to reach also others non-metal genres like hardcore punk ("Burn the Flame") or post-rock ("Blinded by the Rays of Light") with the result that all these influences gives different sounds and atmospheres to the tracks.
Curiously, this bizarre extreme metal melting pot (described by the same band as "Hybrid Metal") can be justified because of Marek "Frodys" Pitlik, the manager, mastermind and singer/guitarist of Awrizis, a very creative man active also in a progressive post-rock/metal band called Postcards from Arkham. And it seem that this album is so strange because its writing process has been a sort of therapy for the same Marek.
Anyway, the songs are mostly melodic, thanks, for example, to a lead guitar that often plays melodies that sounds somehow unusual for an extreme metal album because they can be really catchy or even happy. Anyway, there are also more wicked moments in which Awrizis unleashes a good and genuine violence even detemined by some blast-beats.
Now, I don't like so much numbers like "Lost and Cursed" and the closing "Wildheart", that concludes the album with a too abrupt end. Instead, I prefer (obviously!) the most wicked tracks as "I Am", that's my favorite one due to its furious and somehow dissonant black metal outbursts. In addition, I think that Awrizis have to play more guitar solos because these ones make enrich their sound, by judging the effective results in "From Pain to Strenght".
FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/AWRIZIS
BandCamp: http://awrizis.bandcamp.com/
MetalGate: http://www.metalgate.cz/en
Title: Lioness
Genre: Death Metal
Time: 34 min
Year: 1st June 2017
Rating: 72/100
It's very nice when a band manages to go beyond its usual musical activities by promoting also serious social purposes. This is the case of Purnama, a quartet born in 2011 that runs a musical/social project called Metal for Hope, by which they organize many benefit live gigs with the aim "to help who have not been so lucky in life". For this, they have devolved the sales of the first 100 copies of their self-released debut album "Lioness" to a foundation that fight the children's cancer. But what's about the music into this album?
By listening this 7-song opus, Purnama sounds in a more traditional way if compared with Awrizis. In fact, they play an oppressive death metal ala Asphyx that's mainly characterized by the deep growls of Jakub Viták (that really sings like Martin Van Drunen!), massive and wicked riffs with no guitar solos, and a continuous alternation between bulldozing mid-tempos and earthquaking blast-beats with some doomish passages. For me, all this is expressed at its best by the same titletrack, which ends the album through an haunting atmosphere without any traces of hope.
Very unusual, especially for an extreme metal band, are the lyrics of the songs. I am saying this because this album deals with ecologist, animal-rights and anti-religious themes. In particular, these 4 deathsters are against religions since these last ones divides the humanity, so "Nature is my only master" (as expressed in the track "No Evil No Gods"). Hence, it isn't a case if Purnama dubs theirselves as a "natural death metal band", even though this definition can sound a bit odd without reading before the lyrics.
Sure, I prefer Purnama from Awrizis because the former have an approach more rooted in the old-school death metal but, anyway, this "Lioness" isn't lack of flaws. First of all, I suggest to the drummer to vary better his discourse in order to create more intensity by playing also more thrashing tempos (if I am not mistaken, these ones are briefly present in the only "War for Home") since the simple alternation between massive mid-tempos and blast-beats doesn't works always well. Secondly, the sound of the band needs to be more imaginative since songs like "War for Home" or the mega-violent "Black Panther" could be structured better without useless repetitions. Apart these flaws and considering that the album ends with a great song like the same titletrack (below you can watch its official lyric video), I think that "Lioness" will be a pleasant stuff for everyone into Asphyx or similar contemporaries bands like Kremlin (another band that loves to deal with unusual themes) and War Possession.
Homepage: http://purnama.cz/
BandCamp: http://purnama.bandcamp.com/
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