Angerot – The Divine Apostate
Band: Angerot
Title: The Divine Apostate
Label: Redefining Darkness Records
Release date: 27 March 2020
Country: USA
Format reviewed: Digital Promo
I somewhat feel like for the past few weeks I have been taking mainly European and even further just Scandinavian metal for review, so naturally this week it was time to shake things up a bit. And what better way to shake things up but go all the way across the big pond to the US of A and get something from there?
In 2017 a group of men got together to play metal. A year later they released their debut album titled Splendid Iniquity. Two years later, now in 2020 they are going to show how productive they have been for the time that has passed since, and will later this month release their second full-length album “The Divine Apostate”. The group is question calls itself Angerot, and appears so far to work hard on spewing forth death metal.
The first thing that welcomes you to this album is a beautiful intro, choirs and clean guitars that really set the mood for something menacing approach. The following distorted guitars that chime along with the meaty vocals are very atmospheric. The melodic layer thickets as the choirs chime back in later, however, the said layer is not all that thick in itself. The production strikes as very American; the heavy compressed guitars and drums. It sure is heavy but the overuse of compression makes “Below the Deep and Dreamless Sleep” a bit muddy. “O Son of the Morning, O Son of the Dawn” strikes with an extraordinary verse riff but along with it are so many other things that make the song extremely diverse and a bit hard to keep up with, but even so the guitar solo sound made me think of Death, and that special tone of Chuck Schuldiner.
The more death metal nerve is plucked with “Coalesced with Wickedness”, as well as a haunting side is brought forth with howling vocals and laughter. Well-fitting for this tight track with a nice mix of fast and slow. This track has personality, the eerie feel of female vocals, and manages to stick out in a heavy, technical and musical ways. A breather hits with the short track “Each Night as you sleep, I Destroy” with its demonic Mongolian voices, and leads directly to the next track of “Counsel of the Ungodly”. I was impressed with the fluidity of the album, which is, in my belief, always important to have. The album closes with a very traditional death metal sounding track “Thy Kingdom Burned”. Quite chugged and heavy when it is slow, the d-beat parts are more melodic though and build up to the blast beat, but also incorporates the choirs they had when the album started.
Angerot is not breaking any new grounds on here and it matters not. They have mastered the path they have chosen with some interesting additions to the music such as female vocals and choirs; intriguing parts outside of the death metal formula. It is an album that should be listened to from start to finish without a pause to get the whole picture and so fans of fast, heavy American death metal should be readying themselves for March 27th. 7/10 by Julia Katrin
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