Another compilation featuring bands from the former USSR - mostly from Belarus and Russia - comes to us from Flaming Arts label, which, I think, is just an imprint of Shadow Productions. Nineteen bands this time. Again, some of them (Gateward, Skytemple) I am already familiar with, but all of them are quite obscure. A lot of styles are on display, from death and black metal to all sorts of folk/ambient/electronic stuff. To my dismay, the majority of the bands turned out to be either unremarkable or just plain terrible, so this compilation is not something that you want to have, unless you can get it extremely cheap or, better yet, for free.

In the metal category, blackened doomsters Gateward are the best band here, with a song off of their "Lord Of Aium" demo. The rest of the metal pack on this tape varies from more or less exceptional bands like Waterfall (doom), Natural Spirit (folk-black metal), and Theistic Inferno (progressive death), to very mediocre ones like Mental Eclipse (death/thrash), Knell (melodic black), Great Horn (Pagan black), Skytemple (melodic death), and to downright horrible crap such as Warwick (death/thrash), Paracels (unidentifiable metalized hybrid), and Feedback (instrumental hard rock/heavy metal). On the folk/industrial/electronic side, Pagan folk-ambient project Ice Desert is probably the most impressive band. Other decent groups are Tanquam (sympho-goth-ambient), Bachus (ritualistic, medieval, industrialized amalgam), and Kapishcha (folk-ambient). Stay away from Dielands, I Me Mine, Sleeping Flowers, and Shamaniac, though, for these bands will surely insult your intelligence with their horrible techno/industrial crap (I Me Mine, Shamaniac), or cheesy folk music (Dielands, Sleeping Flowers).

© 2000 boris