Eternal Wake

Well, well, here's a familiar face in an unfamiliar guise ... the man behind Keres turns out to be Atvar who plays all the instruments for one of my favourite Finnish BM bands Circle of Ouroborus. In contrast to CoC who over the years have evolved into a dark urban blues / post-BM band, Keres is a straightforward raw minimal BM cruncher. "Eternal Wake" is the first full-length for Keres after years of releasing demo tapes and a couple of recordings done together with other artists.

Keres' sound is harsh and tinny, and incredibly sandpaper-rough. The guitars are whiny and shrill with a churning grind behind them, as if a cement mixer was about to chew them up, and the drums have a tinny yet muffled cymbal sound. Beats seem basic and occasionally have a rock'n'roll groove. The rusty raspy vocals are far, far removed from the bleak anguish of the singing in Circle of Ouroborus, being low in the mix and coming across as more hostile and angry. At first not a great deal here is reminiscent of Atvar's better known project but starting with the middle track "Hades Visitor", some of that CoC formula begins seeping through the increasingly surly and dark moods, the riffing and melodies.

The music's blurry textures tend to mask over the riffs and melodies in some songs and any individuality or distinctive aspects, especially in earlier tracks, tend to get lost. It's only at the halfway point when the songs become darker and moodier, and Keres' CoC pedigree looms in the background, that the album really perks up and acquires something of an identity. While at first Keres' grinding, wheezing raw-noise guitar doesn't seem too bad, the ongoing bleeding noise can become an endurance test later on as so much of the music is buried beneath and is sometimes hard to make out. The pace on most songs lumbers quite a lot so even though the songs aren't all that long, their progress is laborious and you're just thankful that the songs end when they do.

There might be some really good hooks deep down in the music but I might just prefer to go straight back to Atvar's regular day job to find others.