COUNCIL OF THE FALLEN
Revealing Damnation
(Martyr Music Group)
40:00min

The latest releases in the Florida Death Metal scene – HATE ETERNAL’s second album and the INTERNECINE debut – were great releases as long as you point the focus only on brutality and technical finesse. But the most important factors in my opinion: the song structures, their memorability and the entertaining effect suffered from these technical and brutal excesses and were often simply far too complex. Now there is another album featuring the drumming qualities of Derek Roddy, namely the first official release by COUNCIL OF THE FALLEN "Revealing Damnation". Together with his bandmates Kevin Quirion and Sean Baxter (BROKEN HOPE) COUNCIL OF THE FALLEN unleash a blackened (!) Florida Death storm that does not top the bands I named above in terms of brutality or technical finesse, but tops them with straight, to-the-point and definitely more memorable songs, that represent an extraordinary musical variety featuring Death, Black and Thrash Metal elements alike. This kind of genre-mixing-experiments mostly fail desperately, but not in COUNCIL OF THE FALLEN’s case!!! The three talented musicians manage to create a consistent, intense Metal mixture that contains DARK FUNERAL like "Swedish" riffs, MALEVOLENT CREATION like Death / Thrash parts and brutal Florida Death that should satisfy fans of DEICIDE or MONSTROSITY as well. If you know DECREPIT’s godly "Acrimonium" you should have a good idea of what COUNCIL OF THE FALLEN sound like. The scream / growl vocal arrangements are flexible and unusual and connect, together with the Black / Thrash riffing, dark, hateful emotions with a crushing, driving heaviness. Some songs feature small acoustic guitar passages, a whispered chorus (‘Lying In Wait’) that surprisingly rips brutal Death Metal with a silent interruption and a few melodic solos, like in the fantastic opener ‘Search For Purpose’. "Revealing Damnation" is a great, entertaining and sinister Black / Death Metal album, that unites the stylistic elements I mentioned above in perfection and any open-minded extreme Metal fan should check it out!!! It is without any doubt one of my personal highlights this year and I can recommend COUNCIL OF THE FALLEN as a talented Underground act with a fantastic produced debut CD, that definitely deserves attention. Killer!!! To get an impression of how this band sounds like, surf to www.councilofthefallen.com and listen to the MP3 files there. To contact the vocalist Kevin Quirion, write an email to the following address: vehem@worldnet.att.net

Stefan Franke

Stefan Franke

Related reviews / interviews:
COUNCIL OF THE FALLEN - Interview (Stefan Franke)

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