
Now, I personally don't know Satan, nor do I have a lot of experience with 'd-beat'. So I looked it up. D-beat is an extremely aggressive version of punk and hardcore, named after its pioneers, Discharge.
Judging from the music on MMXIV this 'D-Beat' tag seems perfect for this Canadian quartet. Most of the music is fast and incorporates pounding, often blast-beat like drums. Over all this noise, an array of screams and grunts raises the level of aggression even higher. At moments it's as if I'm listening to a very chaotic modern black metal record. On other occasions I'm reminds of bands like Skitsystem.
Most of the songs are short, extreme attacks on your eardrums and sanity. They're perfect for a live setting including moshpits, stagedivers and crowdsurfers. The songs follow up at a high paste. On many occasions the listener doesn't know whether a song just ended or began. The exeption, 'Interlude (Suffocate) OP 28. NO4' is a dark-drone track, functioning as an omen for more evil and more devastation.
At the end, 'The Coldest Year-Le Drapeau Noir' destroys every last flash of hope on something soothing or even melodic. For an experienced punk/hardcore fan this might be simply perfect but here to, people might think this is just too much of the good stuff. MMXIV offers a few little breathers but the majority of the music is extremely intense and dark. Yet, Dark Cirlces seems to know very well how to bring variation in the record and that's a huge plus.
With this album, Dark Circles is clearly planning on world domination and nothing less. The LP will be released in spring 2015 by Désordre Ordonné (Canada) - Doomsday Machine Records (Canada) -Moment of Collapse Records (Europe) - Grains Of Sand Records (Russia) - 1859 Records (USA) and Replenish Records (USA).
Serge