Holy shit, it seems that Italy’s Death Metal underground is getting stronger and stronger these days. Next to HORRID and NECROFLESH here’s another completely convincing band by the name of NECROSPHERE that easily managed to blow me away. Even though “Revived” is the “official” debut full length of this fourpiece, they have already been active since 1988 under the way too often used CENOTAPH moniker and released two albums (“Thirteen Threnodies” in 1994 and “Heart And Knife” in 1997). Don’t know if they changed musically in any way, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t really care as “Revived” is such an intense offering, that their older stuff only could’ve been weaker. NECROSPHERE’s main influence is quite obviously vintage SLAYER (“Hell Awaits” / “Reign In Blood” period), which results in a whole lot of musical references to the Thrash gods. No matter if it’s the speedy drumming, the heavy riffing or the insane soloing, these guys must’ve worshipped the records of L.A.’s finest to death. But you’ll hear a lot of other extremely raw Thrash elements in their music as well. Some parts on the record do remind me on SODOM in their heydays, while the whole vocal delivery varies between extremely raw Thrash (kinda similar to ANGEL CORPSE’s Pete Helmkamp) and brutal Death Metal. This hellish and totally devastating mixture works perfectly well and gets even more exciting through the band’s very well executed cover of SLAYER’s ‘Necrophiliac’. All in all a totally fresh, yet very brutal sounding offering, from a very promising band that luckily doesn’t follow any current fashion and hopefully will get a lot of attention because of their undeniable class!