Merchants Of Air
  • Home
  • Reviews
    • Albums
    • Concerts
  • Interviews
  • Playlists
  • Nachtpracht
  • Shop
    • Merchants Of Air releases
    • Giveaways
  • About us
    • About Us
    • Writers Wanted
    • Logos and banner
    • Advertise
    • Mailinglist

Serpent Eater – Vanitas

11/11/2019

Comments

 
blackened crust
Wooaaargh Records
Doomrock
7 Degrees
facebook
Picture
When listening to Serpent Eater the feeling of knowing which nightmares will follow might creep up on the listener. The band from Cologne, Germany, releases her second full-length album at the beginning of 2020 upon a world that might not be prepared for what their ears will be facing. 

Not that the world has never heard this mixture of Black Metal, Sludge and Crust; or the swirling guitars and the blastbeats overwhelmed by infernal shrieking and gut-breaking growls at the same time. The guitars deliver more than solid riffing and shredding, play with brilliant scales to shoot through the noise in order to deliver more chaos in this storm of abysmal-ness. The rhythm section is a steady source of deep-toned slow-grooving black currents in a river flowing in a cave deep beneath the surface. It is hard to imagine any metal fan not being blown away by the moody intro to “Ten Floors Down” and impressed by the musical precision afterwards.

There is something about Serpent Eater’s hurricane of sound and chaos. It is the notion of being pulled up by the hair on you arms and simultaneously being drawn by the ankles. It is as if there were two melodies in some songs, one winding upward with the guitar lines, a totally different one going downward with the bass lines. This ambiguity is most on display when the band takes a deep breath and allows for one of the small spaces for the listener to gather his senses without getting his head beaten on the wall. Even if there is only a short change of the guitar lines, for example in “Dead Spiritualist Remains Silent”: when the guitar calms down and the stormy blastbeats step back after roughly 85 seconds in and the song has more air to breathe. From there on, the song loses speed but picks up atmosphere simultaneously. The same goes for the ending of the last song “Dunkelziffer” with its ascent upwards towards a tiny pinch of hopeful morning light shining through the keyhole in the door at the end of the stairs leading from the peaceful outside down into a thunderous darkness.

Serpent Eater is surely not the first blackened sludge or blackened crust band, but the ones that will follow after them surely better give this record a listen as it definitely is state of the art for a genre that embraces those tiny bits of light you see when looking up from right beneath the eye of the hurricane.


​Thorsten

Comments
    Picture
    Support Merchants Of Air, check our our shirts

    Categories

    All
    Acoustic
    Alternative
    Ambient
    Americana
    Avant Garde
    Black Metal
    Blues
    Breakcore
    Classical
    Crust
    Dark Ambient
    Dark Jazz
    Darkwave
    Death Metal
    Doom
    Downtempo
    Dreampop
    Drone
    Drum & Bass
    Dungeon Synth
    EBM
    Edm
    Electronic
    Experimental
    Folk
    Folk Metal
    Funk
    Glitch
    Gothic
    Grindcore
    Grunge
    Hardcore
    Hard Rcok
    Hard Rock
    Heavy Metal
    Hip Hop
    House
    Idm
    Indie
    Industrial
    Jazz
    Krautrock
    Lo Fi
    Lo-fi
    Martial Industrial
    Math Rock
    Metal
    Metalcore
    Musique Concrète
    Neofolk
    New Wave
    Noise
    Noise Rock
    Nu Metal
    Pop
    Post Hardcore
    Post Metal
    Post Punk
    Post Rock
    Power Electronics
    Power Metal
    Progressive
    Psychedelic
    Psytrance
    Punk
    Rock
    Shoegaze
    Sludge
    Soul
    Soundtrack
    Southern Rock
    Space Rock
    Stoner Rock
    Symphonic Metal
    Synthpop
    Techno
    Thrash Metal
    Trance
    Trip Hop
    Vaporwave

Find us on

facebook
google+
twitter
tumblr
​
minds

About Us

Contact
FAQ
Logos and banners
© COPYRIGHT 2015. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.