23 October 2024
The new album of the Gorebringer duo, in which my dear friend Bilge (aka Serpent) handles the vocals, is eventually out. As far as I know from our conversations with him, he made a significant contribution to the creation process as well.
Gorebringer is an interesting band. The band, who occasionally add black metal elements to their music, host a combination that is not often preferred: serving melodic death metal with Gore themes. In terms of musical structure, they resemble the heydays of Gothenburg bands such as In Flames, At the Gates and Dark Tranquillity most. The album, utilizing high-speed drum patterns, generally has an uptempo musical style.
Since I haven’t received the album in physical format yet, I don’t know what is written in the booklet, but there is information in Metal Archives that Carrion is responsible for the drums. That is not true. In fact, drum machine was used in the album. They made a great effort to make it sound as close to acoustic drums as possible. As a listener who is prejudiced against use of drum machines, I must say that I can listen to it without feeling irritated and found it successful so to say. These fast drum parts and high pitched screams that Bilge often prefers, sometimes combined with Dissection-like parts, manage to add a Black metal flavor to the music. Unanimated from Sweden may be given as an example to this approach. However, I should mention that the album has a faster song traffic compared to them.
Gorebringer, who choose the Gothenburg style death metal understanding as the backbone of their music, also show off influences from bands such as Eucharist and Gates of Ishtar. If we were to give an example from USA, The Black Dahlia Murder would be one of the first names that come to mind.
So, since we have referred to so many bands, can we talk about the originality of the music? Absolutely. First of all, as have been proven by many examples, it is not an obstacle for the music to have a lot of interaction in order to be original and fresh. What important is how you perform it and how you integrate the inspirations into your music.
If we talk about Stench, who performed the guitars, the first thing to say is that he is a very good performer. The rhythm guitar is extremely fluent and organic, and a very tight workmanship has emerged in terms of lead guitar as well. The album has great melodies and guitar solos that will wipe the rust off your ears. Stench is like a one-man orchestra. Serpent, on the other hand, manages to ignite the music even more with his vocals that are always harsh and sometimes including gutturals.
The album, with its melodies, black and death metal influences, guitar solos and gore themes, really has a collage that is rarely served. There are also guitar parts played by Stench separately and were then overlapped during the recording process. These also add richness to the music.
My little complaint is that I could not hear the bass guitar very much. I would have liked to hear more prominent bass guitars like Richard Cabeza’s basses in Unanimated. Apart from that, an album cover that is more suitable for the atmosphere of the album could have been chosen.
However, even these deficiencies I’ve mentioned cannot overshadow the quality work that has emerged. Listeners who like their melodic death metal heavy and cite black metal among their favourite genres, come here! There’s some great music here. Well done!!
8/10
