Põhjast – Matused

põhjast-matusedCrafting slowed-down heavy metal in a style that verges on classic doom but incorporates some of the vivid dynamics of black metal, Põhjast release their third album, Matused, to a world audience in need of quality metal faithful to the genre.

Unlike most entries in this sub-genre, Matused is not campy hard rock with metal licks and prolonged droning riffs. Instead, it cuts back to the core of what made heavy metal great, with the amazingly adept vocals of Eric Syre guiding a guitar-driven, riff-based band with a sense of how to create and nurture mood like a doom metal band.

Syre’s vocals highlight these riffs with melodies but do not merely duplicate the notes, but instead serve as a separate instrument, winding around the progressions that guide the song and by carefully choosing where to go in that space, both accentuating consistency and foreshadowing change. Like serpents in the trees of an enchanted garden, vocal melodies slowly enwrap each riff and then merge with it, urging the song on to new dimensions.

Matused follows the time-honored metal tradition of complex songs structures adapted to the material in each song, where riffs comment back and forth. Composition resembles a cross between Candlemass, later Bathory, and Confessor, with thunderous riffs interweaving with vocals while drums keep time with workmanlike precision and bass pumps like a nuclear reactor.

What will win listeners over to Põhjast is the quality of this material, which plays with older riff styles but invents just as many of its own, and its tendency to set up songs so that their dramatic development plays out organically and does not repeat. The result, kicked into high gear by the apparently only recently discovered vocal talents of Syre, drive this band to produce an atmospheric and yet powerful form of heavy metal.

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5 thoughts on “Põhjast – Matused”

  1. Concerned Citizen says:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlUoztT2Na8

    They are roaming in graceful dreams
    Until they find the twisted mind
    And they give the power
    change nightmare to be real

    You don’t know where you came from
    but I know where you will come
    I am your memory
    Dreams are forever
    I burn the past

    Eternal life where souls release
    spread your wings beauty fades
    Who am I my wings are screaming
    I pleasant plight I am dead

  2. kvlt attakker says:

    Cool cover

  3. blauth says:

    At the moment, I’m listening to Mercy’s track “Witchburner,” and I feel that this track just doesn’t stack up. Personally, I’d prefer to listen to Mercyful Fate / Overkill’s “Skullcrusher” because they communicate more to me than this. I’m glad that this band has tried to do something in the traditional vein, but personally I think that this music won’t hold one’s attention for more than a few spins. Twenty seven years on, I’m still listening to Marcolin . . .

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