Void Ritual – Death is Peace
Band: Void Ritual
Title: Death is Peace
Label: Ipos Music
Release Date: 3 August 2018
Country: USA
Format reviewed: High quality digital promo
Void Ritual is another one-man black metal band I have the chance to listen and review these days. With Daniel Jackson being the only member, performing vocals, guitars, bass and taking care of drums programming, this project has been active since 2014.
“Death is Peace” is Void Ritual’s second full-length album, resulting in 6 tracks or 32 minutes of total playing time. Credit here to Ivan (Kosmogyr) for the nice cover art.
As stated on the band’s FB page, from the start Void Ritual’s goal has been to “craft powerful memorable black metal with reverence to the second wave”. Indeed, all the time this influence of the whole second black metal wave can be spotted in all vocals, riffs, melodies, crescendos, and tremolos, so typical of what we know. I found the more influences mostly in the mid 90’s – from the times when there have been more melodic black metal bands, but who were preserving the rawness of the genre one way or another. Think of bands like Dawn, Gates of Ishtar, early Ulver, some early Satyricon, some 90’s Dark Funeral, some Storm, and maybe even a tiny shadow of early Arcturus and Borknagar…This list can go too long, and for the sake of not omitting some band, I’ll just end it here. Of course, there is clear Norway black metal epicness from this period and tiny folk breath of heroism can be spotted here and there among the main riffs.
As far as the tempo is concerned, it is obvious that the blasts are dominant, though there are a lot of calm parts with crescendos and that dark wind blowing from North Europe again… (Gates of Ishtar). I must admit that most of the time I couldn’t get rid of the thought of the programmed drums. Moreover, the uneven beats in the mid and slow tempo parts sound too uneven, really screaming more for mistakes than for originality.
In reality, the album is good, and it may be liked by most the fans of Norway second wave, without being too pretentious. Again, in reality, there is not much to be remembered as an original content in fact. This means there is not much to say about it too. We have heard most of this howling darkness and sunless dawn already and “Death is Peace” turns to be a much of a regular album. 6/10 Count Vlad
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6/10 We may survive
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