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One-man bands are slowly becoming more common nowadays. Here’s one more one example, this one from the burning paradise of burning cars, Malmö, Sweden.

Henrik Nygren is the man behind Carchosa, running the main engine and all the components around it. Musically, it’s obvious Henrik has a soft spot for German kings of Thrash Metal, Kreator, especially their later, more melodic era. The guy sounds a lot of like Mille Petrozza and the riffing also sounds Kreator-ish here and there. However, upon hearing opener "Unfathomable", the first thing that crossed my mind was, "A-ha, someone’s giving a fair try on "Chemical Warfare" by Slayer...". But that’s where the Slayer comparisons ended.

The songs are long, containing many pretty raw, heavy riffs and lots of tasteful, melodic leads that work coherently together, whereas there are some parts in the programmed drums that don’t fit in too well, sounding a tad too amateurish and just clumsy here and there. Not too often, but eating up some of that vital power that the songs would need to really hit and hurt you well enough. What he should try to do is to make his songs shorter because there’s just a little bit too much stuff (the songs vary between 6 and 12 minutes in length), which unfortunately diminishes their potential.

There’s a lot of good and some not so good melodic and punishing Thrash Metal on this record. Given time, I am sure Henrik still has a lot of hidden potential in himself to really explode his bank of songwriting on his future efforts.