painful

热度:520

简介

Frank Sch nle - Bass (2004-present) Andreas "Andi" Hurrle - Drums (2004-present) David "Dave" Renner - Guitars (2005, 2008-present) Michael "Mike" O wald - Vocals (2008-present) Where most unknown bands tend to sink into their own swamp of blandness, forever wiped away from the surface of the scene they tried to mimic in the first place, there are those underground bands that manage to make a difference with a second coming, a sophomore effort that matters, so to say. The first album of Germany's Painful may be bland and quite unexciting, with very little to scavenge for a musical horizon, but wherever the Pain Is the Law failed, Archangel's Requiem succeeds. After the unfortunate demise of the vocalist on the first album, the band still struggled forward to create something much more energy loaded than their previous work. Archangel's Requiem is a monument of an idea done right, namely an unconditional and ruthless outburst of pure brutalness, exaggeration and force, in fact it has everything a good death metal album needs: riffs, energy and a balls out vocalist who knows how to induce a fierceful agony into the music. The album starts off with a short symphonic and dramatic introduction, resembling something you'd hear on every album that wants to be taken seriously from the start. At least the little dramatic feeling the track wants to induce appears as a forshadower of the overall smoothness the album delivers. This could be an introductory trailer track from some film or directly off one of those weird folk "metal" albums, but that is only deceiving, as right after the second track, disruption, kicks in, you immediately reconsider the first impression and with the progression of the album to even more severe death metal tracks with pounding riffs and pure aggression. A vast improvement we have here is not only within the polishing of sound and song engineering, but also within the presentation of the whole package. Tracks such as "Hellfire" are the perfect example of how a sludgy death metal song should be conveyed. In fact, this album may not be this century's ultimate monument of metal, but let me explain the overall atmospheric approach to the whole: the songs themselves being coherent and straightforward, without any boring gimmicks installed, they seem to flow gently through the speakers, not really putting any accents on major annoying crap, that sadly most bands today deem necessary. This is definitely a keeper, as it hauls itself through its total length of about 54 minutes with a vengeance. While the album reminds one of this and that riff from bands we've surely heard before, such as Amon Amarth similarities here and there, the listening experience is a pleasant one. All that can be said about this album is that this represents a major improvement in both technical skill and production quality. This album is simply better than the last and exceeds the last one by miles. If this band is going somewhere, this is all in all a very good start and if they can keep up the pace, maybe we'll even see them at one of those big metal festivals out there.