Carpathian Forest
Through chasm, caves, and Titan woods
[Avantgarde]


Hmmm...Isn't the cover represented on this (18 min.) mCD the same as on the Wongraven CD? No matter I guess:)...The music here is black metal, mid to slow paced, and somewhat reminiscent of early Satyricon or "Under the sign..." era Bathory with a bit of thrash added here and there. Thus, as you can probably guess, this is fairly typical sounding Scandinavian black metal. Let's do a quick look at each of the tracks:

1.Carpathian Forest: A fairly typical distorted guitar riff starts out this song, and then moves quickly into a mid-paced, fairly uninteresting track. Vocals here remind me a lot of those found on Absu's "Sun of Tipareth" album, yet pushed a little less. The tracks basically stays the same for the two and a half minutes it lasts, except for a brief period where a main screeching guitar riff comes over the rest of the music, and rather than simply making the track a tad more interesting, it simply annoys the listener. Blah

2.The Pale Mist Hovers Towards the Nightly Shores: Now this is better! This particular song starts out with a nice thrashy riff and then quickly moves into some thrash related boring black metal. Luckily some interesting drum-work nice usage of synths, and one of those insane early Darkthrone/Beherit solos are added about half way through the song to save it.

3.The Eclipse/the Raven - Strangely enough, the lyrics to this track are the very words uttered forth by Edgar Allen Poe on his poem "The raven". Some heavy reverb, light synths, and Nattefrost whispering the poem is all that is found here. Nothing ground breaking obviously, but somewhat relaxing to listen to.

4.When thousand moon have circled-Sadly enough, it's back to the same old music as heard on the first track. The track runs through a typical mid-passed guitar and drum line, peppered here and there with light keyboard work (especially towards the end). A decent melodic riff concludes the song. Nothing inspiring, nor particularly interesting.

5.Journey through the cold moors of Svarttjern:I suppose Nattefrost and Nordavind (the two members of this band who are joined by two session players) looked at the tracks represented on their near complete CD and said "You know, if we release this unoriginal, typically boring slab of metal, fans will never purchase further releases...so let's think of something fast!". And that they did. This (well-done) track contains vocals unlike those heard on the other tracks (more like those found on the Solefald demo-you know Burzum/Godkiller-ish) some acoustic guitars, and some nice atmospheric synths. I personally found this to be a good move on their part, for if a person were to listen to the album as a whole, most memories of the other boring songs would be erased by this excellent one. Damn them.

Well, as you can see, I didn't quite enjoy this release, but shall most likely purchase their upcoming full-length simply because of the final track (again, damn them-if a band is going to release a boring CD, make ALL of it boring, rather than showing potential on the final track). Typical, yet solid would be the words spewed forth from my mouth if you were to ask for a final summary of this mCD.


© 1997 brand