Solidarity

While the second LP released by these Moscow innovators of the Russian melodic death metal was a result of Max Fedoseev’s (the former band lead guitarist who left the band after he moved to Austarlia) perfection, when he spent at about 4-5 years in his studio recording “Self-Mythology” and polishing every track to its glorious blaze, the new release shows an attempt to reach the balance between the primordial death-metal anger and technical maturity that had already become the band’s trademark almost ten years ago.

Reviewing “Self-mythology” I claimed that the fans normally had to wait 8 years to get the new SE album, now it took almost 9! We really hope that the next LP will be released at least sooner than 2030.

Although the band had written more than a half of all the material for the new album by 2014-2015 it took them more than 4-5 year to get everything together and finish this endless work. During that long period of time the whole era has changed for the band and it’s founder Alexey Dokhov, who was left alone with his long-live counterpart Ruslan Anisimov after Fedoseev left to Australia and the drummer Mikhail Sorokin also decided to focus on his career and other projects. It was a smile of fortune, however, for Dokhov to meet a fantastic couple of a guitarist and a bassist - brothers, Gregory and Roman Pronins. They injected the younger spirit of true metal fury and also managed to nicely assimilate in SE family perceiving Dokhov’s composing style and adding some old-school death metal notes from Roman and technical Annihilator-style solos from Gregory. The guys worked for a long time to create new material, 2 EPs and 1 compilation were released during the 9 year period.

So what do we have? A piece of high quality professional melodic death metal that from one side has a strong influence of classic Swedish melodic death metal from the ‘90s but from another side the material has a lot of old school thrash-heavy metal touches proving once again how eclectic this band can be.

If you are tired of all those modern annoying shredding technical geniuses who are just copying each other and want to get back to the classic punchy but enough resilient sound - try the latest Seducer’s Embrace CD.

The album is opened with a pathetic intro transforming into “Outlander” - angry straight-out hymn to misanthropy and hatred to all strangers typical to our hypocrite world. The follower is a typical SE melodic hit - “W.H.Y.” with a catchy main riff and bright chorus.

On the sixth track, called “Face II Face”, we can hear the voice of Mikael Sandorf (ex-Gates of Ishtar, ex-Helltrain, The Duskfall). Being an old band’s friend, this Swedish guy agreed to participate, with his vocals fitting the most to the song concept of the constant battle between the person and his inner alter ego. While in the next “Event horizon”, which is technically the most progressive on the album, presents a bit forgotten Vsevolod Gorbenko, from the Russian legendary Hieronymus Bosch. This also looks logical as soon as Hieronymus Bosch has always been regarded as the most influential Russian prog-death band. Step by step you come to an absolute “killer” - “Killing characters” that can be from some point of view regarded as the best SE song of the modern era.

One should also mention the tragic hymn of death - “Sea of trees”, devoted to the tragedy of suicide.
Lyrically “Solidarity” has become more simple if compared to sophisticated metaphoric philosophy of Fedoseev’s texts, however, the songs preserved allegorical brightness thanks to Alexander Avduevskiy and Irina Pronina poetic talent.

Never miss a chance to try this piece of sincere modern Russian extreme-metal.