vote
7.0
- Bands:
AN-XUL - Duration: 00:41:41
- Available from: 11/29/2024
- Label:
-
Chaos Records
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There are no introductory demos or presentation EPs for An-Xul: their self-titled debut album is to all intents and purposes the first concrete work created by the Bergamo band, which burst onto the Italian metal scene with a certain vehemence. Moreover, the names that make up the trio's line-up are certainly not new, which conforms around the past experience in bands like Xpus, Dark Redeemer and even Mortuary Drape, more or less well-known names in which our band have refined their instrumental and compositional skills in full force.
So their first album together does not actually sound like a first, immature, effort by inexperienced young people, but rather entangled in a hybrid, dark musical formula, already mature in its constitution and consolidated by the previous and common experiences of its creators.
In fact, An-Xul draws heavily from the occult and forbidden atmospheres of the Mediterranean black metal of the 90s, enriching the scope with violent death metal grafts found above all in the deep voice of bassist L. Plaguer and in the copious bursts of blast-beats scattered along all the songs, creating a fusion that is not original in its intentions, perhaps, but rather particular in its execution.
“Descent Through A Ghostly Maelstrom” gives us all the time to settle into the oppressive settings developed by the band, who also play at massacre in “The Creeping Plague” maintaining the same characteristics of the previous song: what immediately catches the ear are the melodies tense, tortuous and not at all obvious played by the guitar, always poised between violence and atmosphere, between dissonance and melody according to finely crafted chiaroscuro effects. This opposite and dualistic feeling emerges even better with “Abandon God” first and with “Behead The Millennium Creature” then, which, thanks to less sustained tempos, allows A. Nacht to expand his twisted guitar vein to the maximum, while “ Where The Moonlight Dies”, “Raise My Throne Above The Stars” and “Eternal Flame” return to emphasize the more violent side of their proposal, without ever exaggerating.
If stylistically, therefore, An-Xul seem to have immediately found a profitable framework for their work, the sense of repetition and similarity that emerges from the set list is sometimes jarring, a very (too?) homogeneous agglomeration where one could have foreshortened here and there a few passages and insert some more identifying elements between the various compositions.
In any case, “An-Xul” remains a disturbing example of eccentric and unexpected occult metal, capable of using various musical genres in order to convey catacomb sensations of great effect.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM