It was three years ago when I received the previous album of the Canadians for review. I remember liking it when I listened to it, but it didn’t last the test of time in my personal playlist. The band exists from 1998, but it had to be 1999 for their first official release. Their return happens with “Unus”, the sixth full-length album so far.
With new line-up since 2017, as a new bassist and drummer came to support the founder, guitarist, singer and chief of the band Ron “The Witch” Tremblay. The album has ten tracks, with two of them being short instrumentals. The power trio from Montreal give us forty minutes of symphonic death/black metal. The compositions are either mid-tempo or up-tempo with hypersonic blast beats, the riffs are quite interesting at times and the vocals are morbid and well-written. There are also the symphonic elements and choirs on top of that, but they don’t lead and they exist only to make the final result more majestic.
I don’t think that there is a need for deeper analysis. Tracks with short duration that can be listened to easily but without adding something new as they are heavily influences by great bands of this genre. The only ones that stand out are “Ten Thousand Masks” with the middle-eastern elements and “Cursed MMXIX” that is a re-recorded version of “Cursed”, from their first (and only) demo tape “Morbid Ritual” that came out in 1992. This one shows a different face of the band, as it is rawer, without symphonic elements and their choice to write it again was by a result a good one.
But in the end, I think that for me it will have the same fate as their previous one “Advent Of The Human God”. It’s good, but not so good to dedicate more time to it. The fans of this genre thought should check it out.
For The Fans Of: Behemoth, Dimmu Borgir
