Wounded Skies

This band surprised me with the proficiency displayed on this E.P.. They combine an excellent sense of melody (via Dissection) an merge it with they hyper-speed theatrics of Marduk and early-era Immortal. This is all done with an air of confidence and ability. From the moment the gentle intro subsides, you are thrust into some torrential whirlpool of absolutely catchy melodic riffs and speaker-pelting blast beats. These compositions are crafted to produce that “trapped in a battlefield” feeling.

The songs themselves display a degree of variety: wounded skies features a a brooding intro (it actually reminds me a bit of 'At the Fathomless Depths' on Dissection's storm of light's bane album), while the title track - Wounded Skies features a slow, enlightening riff played without distortion (again another Dissectionism - think about the part halfway through 'Nights Blood'). Aside from the musical breaks, it's nothing but high velocity melodic riffs, all of them induce the urge to headbang! At this point they probably sound like complete rehash, but believe me that's surely not the case. These guys pretty much keep the music at a whiplash pace. This is mostly attributed to the drumming. It's fucking powerful in this album and actually ha quite a bit of variety compared to most black metal - the drummer puts in some nice fills and knows how to use parts of the drum other than bass pedals and toms, and in my opinion is actually the albums strongest point. That's not to say that the other musicians aren't proficient, it's just where this band retains most of its identity. Now would be a good time to bring up some weak points, eh?

Fortunately for Stormcrow, they don't display too many, and given that this is their first e.p. the nuances are to be expected. I think first off, given the highly riff-oriented nature of melodic black metal, the production could have been a bit cleaner. Sometimes the guitars would seem to melt together and would require heavy attention to grasp what the guitars are playing, and like with thousands of other bands- the bass is inaudible (except maybe on the clean sections of the album). Of course originality is a slight factor; thus me lowering the score about 5 points (the other 3 goes to the production). It seemed to me that they stuck to lot of songwriting conventions as laid out by the pioneers of the genre; the placement of the aforementioned cleanly played part on the final track seemed eerily similar (although not blatantly similar, I would have grilled the hell out of the album for that) to Dissection's work. Aside from that, these guys have a good knack for songwriting and display an immense amount of ferocity and skill in this E.P. - enough to get a high rating in listener's humble opinion. Fans of melodic black metal definitely should give this one a shot, this band deserves to be heard!