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I don’t know a lot about this band since I didn’t get any press material with the promo but from what I can gather from the CD booklet this band hails from Greece (or at the very least they thank a lot of bands from that area as well as record their albums there…heh). The album was produced by Fredrik Nordstrom and has some guest vocals from the one and only Mikael Akerfeldt (Opeth). These two facts alone give it pretty good credibility with me in and of itself considering one is a absolute killer producer and the other being in one of my favorite bands. I figured the album had to be pretty good if these two people were involved considering their own high quality of work. For once my assumptions were actually correct, this is a damn fine piece of black/death metal.

For the most part this album is more of a slower style death metal than it is black metal but where this black metal influence comes in is with the atmospheric elements provided by the keyboard which is there strictly for atmospheric effect over the top of the guitar riffs. There are also trade offs in vocal styles going from a death metal style growl to your basic black metal scream throughout the album. The guitar work is excellent with some very nice riffs and melody lines over the top for that extra effect. The songwriting is also worthy of note since there are a lot of tempo changes which all seem to flow together very well. The only problem I had with the album at all was the death metal growl style vocals. It is not that I don’t like that style of vocals it was just that these are just not done very well. Maybe it was something in the way they were recorded but they just don’t seem to fit very well with the music while the black metal style vocals are perfectly find. This is actually a very minor complaint since overall I found the album to be a damn fine piece of work.

Overall even though I didn’t know a lot about this band it did make me want to find out more about them and that is always a good thing. Fans of Dimmu Borgir, Solefald, Enslaved or Rotting Christ may be quite interested in this one. Highly Recommended.