Oracle Hands – Dirge for the Doomed

vote
5.5

• Band:
  Oracle Hands
• Duration: 00:40:37
• Available from: 25/04/2025
• Label:

• Moment of Collapse

Authors of a single demi-tape in 2023, a year ago the Oracle Hands have locked themselves in the Tonmeisti I would Tondenburg's studies, relying on the expert hands of Roland Wiegner (Downfall of Gaia, Samsara Blues Experiment and Phantom Winter in his nourished and eclectic curriculum) to fix seven debut songs that play as a brutal) business card.
“Dirge for the Doomed”-a title that could be translated as “funeral lament for the condemned”-moves safely following the post-metal coordinates traced in the past by the Will Haven of “Carpe Diem” (for the veemely performance of the vocalist Wasli K.) to which are added, even in a less marked way, sludge influences (the pachidermic riffs that support ” Poison “and the first single” Black Hands “) combined with accelerations to La Converge (” Nihilistic Rites “), shades that however cannot leave a significant trace in the listener's memory. Of course, the band does not lack technical competence, and the sound is produced beautifully, but what is still missing from the four German musicians is basically a repertoire of songs that allows them to stand out within a scene, the post-metal one, really crowded.
Despite the beautiful cover and a promising opening song – “The Order”, with its muddy guitars of guitars son of the Eyehategod – the album moves with difficulty, with the “Nihilistic Rites” previously mentioned that it suffers the being preceded, in 2025, by dozens of too similar songs and a “Drain the Poison”, undecided until it is unresolved, in its changes of atmosphere. In this context, “Dirge for the Doomed” therefore ends up getting noticed, rather than for the pieces that make it up (whose writing remains rather school), for the intuitions that are hot in the same. Among these, the solid electric backdrop that supports “Pulse”, daughter of repeated listening to the Envy, who is configured as the most exciting composition of the lot, recovered and reread from the first demo-tape of the band,; Or, the contagious rhythm of “dissonance of the tongueless” and the shabby and catatonic tail of the final “Into the abyss”. In short, details that lead to hope in a more successful second album, but who cannot make the feeling of being in front of a decidedly anonymous debut less concrete.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smfdxbab88e