You’ve got to admire Atrocity for being totally un-taggable! You can’t pigeon-hole Atrocity…usually because the band themselves don’t really know what particular genre their next album will be! They’ve given us albums in the style of Death/Industrial/Gothic/Technical Death/Folk/Dark…you get the idea, though I get the feeling that the band may have felt they have lost their way a little recently. Their previous three releases (another gothic covers CD, a trad-folk metal-type thing and a live/best of) have seemingly helped focus the band back into Extreme Metal. Okkult, I am informed, is the start of a musical trilogy – so what does part one offer…
I suppose with such a schizophrenic band as Atrocity striving for a new dawn it was never going to be an album in just one style of Metal was it? Let’s start with the 4 tracks, dotted throughout the album that we can possibly categorise as Epic Extreme Metal. Opener ‘Pandaemonium’, along with ‘March Of The Undying’, ‘Necromancy Divine’ and ‘La Voisine’ all have big choral backing vocals and passages, swimming amongst Dark Technical Death and Symphonic Black Metal arrangements. They do it really well…but I’d heard this style before somewhere…someone has done this…and they had really annoying vocals…Oh Bollocks! It’s Cradle Of Filth! Alex Krull is ten times the vocalist of Dani but yep – Cradle Of bloody Filth circa Midian. But that’s only four songs – and this is Atrocity, so what if their second track sounded like classic Slayer Thrash? Because that’s what the rather tackily titled ‘Death By Metal’ brings to the party!
Slayer and Cradle Of Filth and only 2 songs in – Atrocity aren’t messing about and it’s pretty obvious that they intend this to one of their heaviest releases in many years – if ever. The rest of the album has variations of the theme set by the first two – those aforementioned 4 are nestled in-amongst mid-tempo Melodic Death Metal (‘Murder Blood Assassination’), full-on German language Industrial Club Metal (‘Satans Braut’), Technical Death/Thrash Metal (‘Masaya’) and my favourite two tracks on Okkult that nod towards the Extreme Dark/Gothic Metal of Atlantis (‘When Empires Fall To Dust’ and ‘Beyond Perpetual Ice’). Both these latter tracks (buried towards the end of the album by the way…) utilise dark arrangements and a simple high lead riff style running throughout (a guitar style My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost used a lot), though the music and vocals never dip out of their Extreme Metal intensity. The whole album is of course flanked by a Horror film style intro and outro which I’m sure means all elements of the Trilogy will slot into each-other.
This is Atrocity, and everyone will have a different favourite, depending on their favourite face of Atrocity. My only concern is whether all the styles within Okkult actually blend and allow the album flow – but if that wasn’t the band’s intention, then job done guys! Okkult is kind of three Atrocity albums in one – maybe THAT’S the trilogy?? Anyway, this is just Okkult – who knows what particular blend of Metal Atrocity will have to offer on their next release.
(6/10 – Andy Barker)
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