The Unholy Spell

I've got randomly recommended this album in an album exchange in a Discord server. I don't tend to listen to random suggestions as I tend to find bands that I might like and hear those, instead of pressing the play button on any album that I might find and probably sitting through an hour of terrible music, but this time I decided to give this a go and I found an album which I certainly liked, and since I'm supposed to share my opinion on this album to the person who I got paired with, I decided that writing a review of it in this site would the best way of doing so.

To be honest, this album sounds like pretty generic thrash/death metal; nothing in it makes this album special or separates it from the rest of the works by bands in this genre, but this doesn't exactly mean it's bad, as you can play generic music but still make it decent and enjoyable. "The Unholy Spell" offers us 8 fast, relentless and heavy songs, of the kind that go well with moshing and headbanging. There's a bunch of different riffs throughout the songs, most of them rooted in thrash but with the ever-present death metal influence, which is shown in the form of "evil" (as to put in some way) tremolo riffage and the occasional fast riffs alternating the open string with different chromatic notes in the 6th string. The songs have somewhat interesting structures; I tend to get lost due to the different and rapidly changing sections these kind of songs have, where they jump directly from a verse to a bridge, then to another verse with different riffs and out of nowhere a sudden stop which quickly turns into unleashed hell, and this is both nice to hear but also confusing, because you never get to understand these compositions, and they end up sounding like a bunch of different riffs and ideas thrown together at random.

Apart from the non-conventional structuring of these tracks, there's also some usage of different time signatures and intentional shortening or extending of a riff or section (such as playing a riff for an extra measure), which creates some sense of chaos in these songs. There are some random bridges in 1/4 or 2/4 which consist of a sustained power chords, a bass line, a drum fill or some short riff, which is an abrupt yet chaotic way of continuing a song and connecting two different ideas together. If you pay attention to these songs while listening to this release, you can find a lot of different funny things going on, which is something certainly interesting to do, because it'll most probably take you hearing these songs various times before you become familiar with them.

Now, even though I'm somewhat praising the guitar work and overall quality of the songs, there's a bunch of things I disliked from "The Unholy Spell". First of all, is the constant recurrence of tremolo-picking. All songs have riffs rooted in tremolo-picking, and these tend to be played during at least 50% of these tracks, and it gets fucking boring and predictable, you can sense when a tremolo riff is going to come up in the music after the third track. There's also an important lack of lead guitar work; only some songs have solos, and they are lackluster 2-to-4 measures long shreds, and I know that there's no need to have solos every song, or at all when you're just trying to make brutal, impactful music, but hearing these riffs all the time it really gets in your head, as there's almost no lead guitar; no licks, almost no harmonics, almost nothing at all, and this leads us to my third point, which is the repetitiveness of this whole album: I literally can't tell what track I am hearing because they all sound exactly the same to me, since they use the same style of riffage, same still of vocals, same guitar tone, and there's almost nothing that can make you easily differentiate "Spiritual Cancer" from "Area 51", or any other track in the whole album, if you haven't listened through it to a point where you know that Riff A belongs to song B, and this is my biggest problem with this thing: the total lack of originality when writing all the 8 songs, they all feel like variations of the first one, and it gets boring as fuck.

Now, just not to ignore the rest of the instruments and keep this review structured as my previous ones, I'm going to explain what I got from the rest of the band members. The vocals are quite standard, you've got the common, black-metal styled guttural and the generic death metal growl which has been heard more times in metal than 0s in djent songs, I can't say anything good of them, yet I can't actually bash them or anything, they're just there. The bass is somewhat audible, and it just plays its rhythm parts, no other task is given to it more than following the guitar, which is, as always, a shame. Lastly, the drums are ok, there's a lack of blast beats which I'll assume it's because the drummer didn't have two pedals, but he's skilled enough to play in this genre, as it's shown by his fills, his beats and overall the good playing of his instrument.

On the technical side, the audio quality is good, not great, just good, it was recorded in a professional studio apparently, so it's definitely above the average release from any random band. The mixing of the songs is not as good though; the guitars and the vocals are louder than everything else, and there's a lack of bass boost, so I can hear the bass just in some parts where the vocals and/or the guitars aren't as present and constant, and I can hear the bass drum and some other parts of the drums in similar moments as well. The guitar tone is also terrible in my opinion, and it gets in your head after some songs, and it makes listening to the album somewhat... frustrating? I don't know, but that guitar tone doesn't leave me with a good taste in my mouth.

So, is this a good album? Yes. Do I recommend it? If you like thrash/death metal, yes. Would I listen to it for a third time? Most probably not. "The Unholy Spell" is a good album, but just that, it's definitely not a masterpiece, not even an interesting or original approach at music or this genre in general, but it's still somewhat enjoyable. Maybe someone who likes this genre will find it way better than I do, but in my opinion, it's an above average effort, and it could have been way better, but this is what we've got and this is how I see (or hear) it.

I'd headbang and mosh to this music anyway though.