Apocryfal is a death metal band, hailing from Sweden, which is one of if not the capital of death metal. The band formed in 2009, and has remained active since it's formation. However, for the main portion of their career, they never released any music in an album format. But in 2012, they did release their demo album, entitled Ravens. And if you can't tell by the title, I got my hands on the demo, and I'm thus reviewing it.
Once again, Apocryfal is another band that I first got in contact with over the Metal Archives forums site. And like most bands, I do thank them for all of the cooperation in getting me a copy of the album.
The demo itself is consisted of three songs. Those songs are:
1. Dark Matter
2. Ravens
3. Script
The songs themselves feature that always recognizable death metal sound to them. From the blasting of the drums, to the twin guitars shredding their way into your ears, and to the always audible guttural vocal styling of Pasi Vastamäki. The death metal sound is in here in spades, and will be familiar to any old DM fan.
In fact, the sound quality itself is very good. Everything is audible to the listener (well outside of the bass, but then again it's metal so the bass isn't always going to be heard), and can be clearly picked out. You know that the music and instruments are there, and can thus pick up on every chord, and beat of the drums. The vocals never fade out, in fact, nothing really does.
As for the songs themselves, they're really nice as well. The lyrical themes and content is the usual old depression, getting beat down, etc. The lyrics themselves are written out very well. Although Dark Matter does repeat two lines pretty much for the entirety of the song. I know it can be commonplace within the genre to do this, but I do wish it wasn't just the same lines on repeat. As far as the other songs are, they have different lyrics throughout the run time for their respective songs. Nothing gets repeated, it's just straight forward.
In the end, Ravens is a very good album. The sound quality is fantastic, you could even say perfect. The instrumental sections are great, and the vocals are great as well. Aside from my little nitpick about Dark Matter being repeated lyrics, the album is pretty much perfect.
A+
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