Heritage of Warlords

Formed in 2005 by Russian multi-instrumentalist SiN, Astarium has been quite busy, with fifteen releases in less than ten years. Heritage of Warlords, released in 2013, is an extremely short demo, featuring four tracks and totaling a whopping nine minutes in length. Regardless of length, this demo apparently serves as an homage to bands that influenced Astarium's sound in along the way.

Astarium primarily plays symphonic black metal, which as a sub-genre can be misleading. Rather than the bloated and rather pompous styling usually associated with symphonic black metal, Astarium's sound is rather raw and rapacious trem-laden black metal with a thick overlay of keyboard tracks. Having been previously acquainted with their fourth full length, Atenvx, I can vouch that the keyboards do get a little overbearing at times, but it's certainly an interesting and different take than the usual pretentiousness of some bands.

In a strange move, rather than covering symphonic black metal bands, Astarium brings four intriguing choices to cover for this short demo; intriguing in that these are some rather notorious underground acts: covering (the Brazilian) Evil's “Holocaust Black Metal”, Satanic Warmaster's “Black Metal Kommando”, Graveland's “Black Metal War” and a hidden track, which is actually Burzum's “The Crying Orc”. While most of the original works are lo-fi, gritty and primal black metal Astarium is able to inject his own identity into these songs. I wouldn't say that SiN's playing is completely true to the original, as the Satanic Warmaster cover seems a little slower than the original and the Evil track doesn't have quite the presence of the original, he does a fine job making sure you know which tracks he's covering.

Imagine the original tracks with very prominent keyboard lines streaming through the background and you have the gist of Heritage of Warlords. I mentioned that SiN's playing is a little off at times, but the riffing on “Black Metal War” is spot on, and the keys add a new element to an aging song. It's an interesting concept, taking these grainy, lo-fi songs and adding overarching “epic” keyboards, but there's not a whole lot to take away from this release. It's interesting to hear a different take on some classic songs, but Heritage of Warlords really only serves as a novelty or collector's item.