Valkyrian Music

Abysme
Strange Rites
Released: September 2012
Death Metal
Released via Hellthrasher Productions

‘Strange Rites’ is the debut album from the American death metal band Abysme.

After the dark ambient style intro it’s straight into death metal with ‘Scribbled In Dust’ offering stereotypical old Morbid Angel style growls, steady drumming and guitar riffs. The tempo is mid-to-low pace depending on the song, which is fairly standard for this genre. There’s a few attempts at thrash metal style guitar solos such as the one at the start of ‘Formless’ though these do little to make the any particular song stand out.

More often than not you get these slow, almost doom metal-esque intros followed by some average sounding slowish death metal. ‘Annihilated Memory’ is a good example of this problem; it just lacks energy and has a tendency to drag on for a bit longer than necessary. Same thing applies to ‘Gift To The Gods’ in which the guitars riffs only add to the monotony of the vocals. Then there’s the random stop-starts on ‘We Shall Sleep’ and ‘Fallen Colossus’ which wreck what may be been two energetic and semi-decent death metal tracks. The only song that has potential is ‘Remarkable Conqueror’, mostly due to the increase in pace and the guitar riffs during the first part of the track.

This is more like another demo recording rather than a studio album as some of the tracks sound as though the band was still learning how to play together.

2.5/5

Iza Raittila

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This entry was posted on 11th September 2012 at 7:44 pm and is filed under Review with tags Dark ambient, Death Metal, Doom metal, Morbid Angel, Thrash metal, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.