The first time I saw the cover of that cd I immediately thought about how it’s was clever, ingenious, a sort of distorted sarcastic and sick image of decadence, from a certain perspective inspired by medieval miniature, a vision of mad obscurantism. The music is a well preformed form of Black Metal with symphonic influxes, the guitar riffs are a mix of the Death Metal heaviness together with not too melodic Black Metal riffs. The keyboards are played with some strange "celestial" sounds that have the result to appear something sinister, a contrast with the rawer solution chosen for the guitars. I was hoping for something more sick compared to the artwork but a song like "Totentanz" is very impressive. The singer have o voice similar to Abbath’s reckonable style and I can say that he accomplished his work. The limits of "Altered Flesh" is to have some not so sensible but not isolated falls of tension, sometimes the drums tend to lose their intensity on some fast parts, probably ‘cause of their acoustic recording, or better they aren’t always the right engine to emphasize some adrenaline rushes, not surely because of the drummer that plays with a lot of precision, it’s probably a matter of mixing. I will never stop to say that produce a symphonic Black Metal album will always be a difficult thing ‘cause of the attention to the balance of the different volumes. "Altered Flesh" is already an interesting release and I think that this band is also very promising.
Ild
Vote
4/6