Year of release: 2018
Label: World Terror Committee
Rating: 8,6 / 10
A very interesting new release from WTC - interesting at least because it stands out a little against the background of the late roster of this German label. Recently, WTC made me bit tired of the monotony of the music it releases. Someone will call it constancy and will also be right, but I am sick of this abundance of Swedish-style Black Metal.
ADAESTUO sometimes goes this way too, but only sometimes. The international project - musicians from Finland and the USA, the vocalist from Poland - created a very unusual album based on traditional black metal. The track record of the male part of the band is impressive - HORNA, SARGEIST, VITSAUS, SATURNIAN MIST, NEUTRON HAMMER, DEMONCY, NIGHTBRINGER, CRIMSON MOON, KULT OV AZAZEL, and this is not all! The vocalist's achievements are more modest - the solo project HEKTE ZAREN and guest singing on the albums of ambient HOARFROST. However, it is she who is responsible at least for the execution of most of the interesting creative ideas on “Krew za Krew”. I can hardly be mistaken if I say that the voice is the most important instrument on this album. Depending on the situation, Hekte Zaren either angrily screams, or howls something ritual, or with different voices depicts a crowd of tormented souls, or performs something like a sinister opera (I say this only in a good way). Since the crushing ambient makes a good part of the album, the vocals get the spotlight again and again.
Nothing special is to be expected from metal on "Krew za Krew". Everything here is typical: candinavian school, switching between slow paced fragments, fast blast beats and mid rhytms in the vein of BATHORY. But what's the surprise - it turns out, when all this is served in carefully measured portions and does not fall out on the head with a huge 6-7 minute piece of constant blasting, such music is perceived completely differently. As in the old days, when feelings have not yet been dulled by listening to hundreds of albums, you begin to feel all the bottomless darkness that stands behind the rather trivial riffs. Undoubtedly, a well-chosen sound also plays a big role here. The complex theme of the album, based on a huge baggage of knowledge about the occult, magical and otherworldly, in itself implies something divorced from the ordinary, and the people who worked on the sound understood this very well.
I stop here. I think you have already figured out that “Krew za Krew” is amazing. Must have.