Serenades of Astral Malevolence

Don't be fooled! The song names, lyrical themes etc are gloriously cooked sounding but the music is quite normal; I feel like I could tab out Convocation of M64 the first time I listened to it, which isn't really a good sign for what I expected to be fairly out there black/death.

I'll admit here that this isn't really my main style of music, so my comparisons may be a bit outta whack; what I'm hearing in parts sound a bit like the dumber riffs on Mayhem's DMDS dumbed down a bit again, lots of blasts, and you can tell it's really black metallish because they tremelo pick those open low strings instead of palm muting them. Things are quite repetitive, IZ seem to have this tendency to smash one riff into the ground, then introduce another one where they do the same thing, so on and so forth. It's not super exciting, but the general briefness of the songs and the album as a whole work in their favour in this regard; I didn't find myself getting bored. There's a bit of that early second wave melody in points, it's quite energetic; personally I prefer where they just blast on the lower strings while the vocalist does his lower growls, but the rest of it is neat enough as well.

I daresay that my general lack of exposure to this particular type of black metal helps me enjoy this little album; I get the feeling that it's quite generic in it's overall sound and riffset but it's still somewhat fresh to me. Anyway, yeah, it's not bad, but it definitely doesn't live up to the excellently weird song names and lyrical themes they're going for.