The Latent Doctrine

When I read the name of the band I expected a CD from an Ukrainian or Russian folk metal band, but it turned out to be a Slovak “symphonic pagan black” metal. Quite an unusual genre, unfortunately we cannot say the same about the music.

The cover and the keyboard intro evokes truly demonic atmosphere and the album can start. Unfortunately with not really an interesting track Circle Of Actived Powers .. massacres the ears quite well, but that's it. Second song starts and I reckon that I have the CD Norther – Mirror of madness in my CD player :-) After the intro everything changes to “normal” and both the clean voice and riffs typical to pagan metal bands dominate .. there is space for an acoustic passage, too .. good music. But from this song on all we can expect is a mixture of not really special black metal songs in any possible way I can think of. Keyboards come to the front all the time, at times the blast of the riffs is disturbed by a kind of disharmonic solo. After first three four songs the album becomes one virtually unchanging mass, which doesn't really leave any impression on the listener .. maybe only Belial with quite an interesting opening and good guitars at some moment. Album is closed by a keyboard outro.

After couple of spins I still couldn't start liking the album .. some good passages can't save the whole album from boredom. We'll see how this band will evolve in the future.

Written for http://www.metalzone.info