Blight

Occasionally I’ve found myself wondering what it would be like if Arsis slowed down a little, put a bit more emphasis on creating melodies rather than simply implying them amongst a sea of notes, and had more gradual transitions between beats and musical sections. Amidst a rather sizable collection of underground bands in America who claim similar influences, I found my answer in Thracian, a band also hailing from the east coast, yet a bit further north in Long Island. In much the same fashion that Slayer slowed down their rather frenetic thrash style a bit on “South Of Heaven”, the same holds true on “Blight”, a rather solid EP that takes some of the thrashing melodic elements of Finnish bands like Kalmah, takes out the keyboards and throws in a host of intricate leads.

The contents of this album rests somewhere between “Swamplord” and “United In Regret”, taking a little time for atmospheric guitar mixing, but mostly coasting at a reasonably fast tempo and letting the guitars do all the talking. The vocal work mostly consists of that thinner shouting approach typical to melodeath bands, and only throws in the occasional low bark for a climactic point of the song. The lead work does not consist in any one soloing point or a few interludes, but instead comes and goes as it pleases, pretty much always at the most opportune spots. In much the same way as Skyfire’s earlier works (granted, without the keyboards and symphonic backdrop), things change pretty often and the leads will often coexist with lead vocal lines.

Every song on here is good, but nothing quite jumps out as being jaw dropping, it’s more of a consistent listen than a groundbreaking one. “Conflagration” ratchets up the technical guitar work and probably has the most pick sweeps and scale runs on this album, while avoiding the mess that can come out of a lot of technical death bands. “The Sullen Heart” and “Ghost Of Her” are very animated and switch in and out of riff happy thrash sections and chugging grooves, taking care to hold onto an idea just long enough to let it stick, and then moving on to new territory. It tends to wonder around quite a bit, but stays reasonably organized and actually sounds like a group of songs rather than an all out technical display separated into 5 parts.

The good pretty well outweighs the bad here, although this doesn’t quite get into classic territory. There are a lot of bands out there playing in this style, and Thracian needs to throw in a few more original parts to separate themselves from the European and American acts that have influenced them. But the potential is definitely there to develop this into something formidable. For those who go for the Northern European mode of melodic sensibility and are also not turned off by a fair amount of technical shredding, this has a good amount to offer.