CD review: 'In Light of Dark Days'

CD review: 'In Light of Dark Days' - Metal Invader

No one can deny that in recent years it’s common for extreme bands to fuse the Death Metal genre with other genres. Most of the times, this union proves to be a successful one, as the overall results exceed our expectations, by delivering something different and oftenly unique, yet pleasing to our ears.

Following this path, today we’ll be dealing with a band called The Crawling, coming from Lisburn, Northern Ireland. This three-piece band has been active since 2014 and so far has released a single (“Chocking on Concrete”, 2015) and an EP entitled “In Light of Dark Days”, which is our deal here. It consists of three tracks, “The Right to Crawl”, “End of the Rope” and “Catatonic”, having a total runtime of 20 minutes.

“In Light of Dark Days” oozes anger, disgust with life and a profound will to dwell in madness and psychological instability. The Crawling managed to combine Sweden’s Melodic Death Metal with Doom passages and fierce vocals. The riffs used vary in rhythms and heaviness; there are moments when the guitars are so slow and heavy as a ton of concrete and moments when the fast riffing – combining both Black and Death Metal techniques – increases your heart beat. The compositions actually have a strong influence quality, i.e. they can speak to you, grab you by the hand and lead you to a dark, unapproachable place, away from any human contact. Or at least, that’s what I felt. Lyrically speaking, the themes used by the band and their way of delivering their thoughts are powerful; everything is boosted by the excellent vocal performance and the to-the-point channeling of emotions. The production of the record isn’t top notch or crystal clear, however it manages to efficiently present to us the different aspects of each track.

Hopefully we’ll listen to a complete, full length effort soon, as the samples we got from the band’s single and EP are worth our investments. Check them out; “In Light of Dark Days” will definitely leave you satisfied.

4/6

Metal Invader

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CD review: 'Anatomy Of Loss' - Ram zine

There’s some great titles on this album and one is ‘An Immaculate Deception’ that possesses some tough and twisting rhythms with a deep dark grunting vocal that you can feel in your gut as it rips your intestines out!
Moving on to the next track ‘Poison Orange’ I can almost hear the band laughing when they thought up this track title, but also can feel the harshness brooding as it plays out and leaks its venomous liquid through its vicious assault, and this is without being played fast.

‘Acid on my Skin’ speaks volumes from its title and will have you believe that it is toxic and caustic and of course you would be right to believe as its abrasive mark is made with a very potent vocal and large slices of darkened rhythms.

‘All Our Failings’ is a very imposing track that holds a lot of insatiable bait. It begins fast and then slows down to reveal that it can’t make up its mind if it wants to move faster or slower so you just have to go along with the flow, however, the track contains real…

CD review: 'Anatomy Of Loss' - Demonszone

ANATOMY OF LOSS is the debut album from the semi-sober Irish death metal band THE CRAWLING. A promising band with an even more promising album.

After the release of their three track EP IN LIGHT OF DARK DAYS, I have been looking forward to hearing this record. In terms of style and sound, this album is very much more of the same. There is a vast selection of death metal riffing, each one being as catchy as the other thanks to having more emphasis on the rhythm rather then following the idiotic trend of how fast and extreme they could play.

When the group aren’t thrashing out on their instruments, they are playing slow heavy chords that is best described as doom metal. These songs start off slow (a little too slow for my personal taste) and had they been a little longer, they would have been a little tedious. But THE CRAWLING seem to have enough common sense to realise that each song requires a good hook and just when things slow down, they burst into life with some mean riff. Both styl…

THE CRAWLING

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