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Drudkh > Пригорща зірок (Handful of Stars) > Reviews > Devirginizer
Drudkh - Пригорща зірок (Handful of Stars)

How can one... - 0%

Devirginizer, November 2nd, 2010

How can one once so holy, fall so far from righteousness?(quoting Diablo II)

I knew this day would somehow come. The day that I would write off Drudkh. After having such a list of great, originally written albums, I knew that someday they would change into something completely different than they used to be. I just had this feeling. I think this all started because of a phenomenon I prefer to call the "Alcest-hype". I actually like the band Alcest, because I think it is one of the first band who added all the post-punk/shoegaze influences to mid-bpm depressive black metal, a more funkier played bass, which made it sound more "pop-like", and of course, no screaming vocals, or at least not many. This band has set the tone for me, because I had seen on MySpace that their formula attracted a lot of fans, lots of the females, and this proved for me that their music had become more accessible to "the grey capitalistic mass". I always believed that black metal never had any purpose such as attracting fans or making any big money out of it, so it had a great impact on me to see that even the music genre Black Metal had reached such a level of commerciality.

Sadly, also the once great Drudkh has given in to this phenomenon. Their formula of atmospheric black metal mixed with Slavonic folk worked, but doesn't last forever. It is on this album that they ran out of inspiration so badly that they had to turn into something completely different from their previous work in order to write something original again. This is what you get.

Their production has improved since the first album, and reached its peak I think, on Estrangement. As for most things: what goes up must go down. On this album, the production is completely overdone. For example, the drums sound totally computer edited. Especially the snare: it just sounds too perfect, it has no actual note in it as we were used to. I also hear a complete different way of playing, with ghost notes and even quite slow blasting parts. The drums now have a jazzy feeling, which I think doesn't fit with Drudkh.

As for the vocals: no complaints about that, but I have never heard them as clear as on this album. With the bass, things are even better. It keeps improving on every album, and I really can't state anything against how it is produced or anything. It's exactly how it's supposed to be, playing along with the chords with subtle variations from time to time, and with every album it is played slightly better.

The most important thing that saddened me were the guitars, actually. It was the production of the guitars which attracted me to Drudkh, because they used some distortion which made the guitars lines sound like a hazy distorted wall of sound (I later discovered it was Line 6 Insane). This made both Drudkh as well as the other projects in which Drudkh-members are involved sound very unique. On Handful of Stars however, there is no such thing. The guitars are only lightly distorted and the touching of the strings is well-articulated. This sound could even be used by any britpop band.

As for the music itself, what happened to the riffs? What is left of the Slavonic influences? Nothing, I say. Totally nothing. They changed into some post-punk related crap. There is no atmospheric black metal in the music left. Yes, they do have intermezzos, and yes, there are guitar solos and sure, there are clean parts, but the riffs just sound so empty, soulless, chewed-out and pretentiously sensitive. Like pop music mixed with Black Metal. Like, an Alcest album.

Drudkh, you've lost a fan.