Friday 10 February 2017

Wombbath / Departed Souls - Embrace the Cold...

WOMBBATH / DEPARTED SOULS - Embrace the Cold... (RAW SKULL Rekordz CD 2016)
I love splits. And I can only be happy that this idea of joining two or more bands on one CD/LP/MC/whatever didn’t die and more and more such stuff is released. I’ve enjoyed many splits that came out in 2016 and here’s yet another one, which brought my attention. Two great bands, both with some new crushing songs – can there be anything better?
First comes Wombbath. Yes, this is the same band, which had a good album “Internal Caustic Torments” released in 1993 and then catastrophic miniCD “Lavatory” in 1994. They reformed in 2014 and since then their catalogue has been increased with second full length album and few splits, one of which is “Embracing the Cold...”. There are two songs from Wombbath here and on both Wombbath offers old school death metal. What else could it be, right?! The band is Swedish and obviously they sound Swedish, but with that harsher, more aggressive and vicious style. The first of their songs is pretty typical, but solid, while the second “Punisher of Broken Oaths” is truly killer, in my opinion. I love how fast and aggressive, how nasty it is, I love the riffs and everything about it, so this song is a winner for me. The production could have been a bit better, for example the song they have on split with Revel in Flesh sounds better… but it’s not a major complain from me, I like it. Good, worthy comeback.
Departed Souls debuted with fantastic “Barbaric Tortures” in 2015 and I come back to this release (which I have on CD and 10”MLP) often, because I just love it. Here we have three songs, but one of them is a live recording, so I’m not gonna discuss this one. In other two the band sounds very old school and they also take a lot of influence from the Swedish scene, but not only, as I personally prefer to simply call them an European sounding death metal band in general, without having a tag of copycat of one band only. Departed Souls have killer riffs, very good vocalist, their music shred with no mercy and damn, I just like it a lot! “Fear... Pin Head” – which is sort of new version of a song from “Barbaric Tortures” - is better of the two songs, it’s dark, ferocious, it’s fast and just brilliant. But “Cold Deep Waters” is also fantastic and believe me, if you dig this sort of death metal then you will like this band a lot. For me Departed Souls is one of the best bands from this sort of playing in Europe at the moment, I would love to see them releasing a full length album, sadly it’s postponed due to their drummer’s serious illness. I wish him all the best and hope it all will end up good and they’ll attack us with the killer music again soon.
Killer, recommended split.
Standout tracks: “Fear…”, “Cold Deep Waters”, “Punisher of Broken Oaths”

Final rate: 85/100

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