DELIVERANCE is a Black Metal band from France that I did not know. I had never heard them before. From what I saw, they have been active since 2013 and have an EP and three full-length albums in their history prior to this new album, “The Voyager Golden Banquet”. And well, let’s get to work: the album opens with ‘Hellisual’, a track that begins with somewhat cosmic sounds that, little by little, incorporate the guitars and the rest of the instrumentation. The voice appears and it is the typical voice of a Black Metal band. A somewhat slow track, but interesting because of those background sounds. I have always said it: the voice is decisive in a Metal band for me and I must admit that I could not connect with the voice on this album initially. Around the fifth minute, the track accelerates and makes it even more typical of the genre. The second track is ‘Chasing The Dragon’, which starts with a guitar that has a quite Heavy Metal riff (and I like it). The same thing, the track begins to progress little by little, until it derives into a galloping rhythm that once again adheres to those cosmic and undulating sounds coming from the synthesizer. ‘Headspace Collapse’, the third track of the album, takes us back to those initial synthesizer sounds, this time rounded by slow, marked drums, a guitar that makes some kind of Jazz harmonies and a bass that rumbles as if from the background until a clean voice emerges that remains clean almost until the middle of the track, when the Black Metal voice of the rest of the album returns and then becomes deeper after the organ sound. We jump to the fourth track of the album: ‘Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out’, a mid-tempo track that is one of the ones I liked the most. I like the march, the atmosphere, those synthesizer sounds and in general the very structure of the track that later becomes a bit experimental. ‘As Above, So Below’, the fifth track of the album is a short instrumental that is spoken. Then comes ‘Ground Zero’, a track that, again, starts slow and that (again) coats its structure with somewhat Jazz rhythms. I am not very fan of these kinds of things in Metal. But I think I understood that it is part of the album’s concept. And we reach the last two tracks of the album: ‘The Banquet Part 1’ and ‘The Banquet Part 2’. Two tracks that go more in the traditional Black Metal line and that combine tradition, without leaving aside that incorporation of synthesizer sounds that made part of the entire journey of the album. In general, I had a good impression of this band and this album. I admit that I am not very much into this type of experimentation or simply of this style, but that does not mean that the band has not displayed an interesting album. More information here: www.facebook.com/deliveranceband, www.facebook.com/ladloproductions