As a brand new death metal band from Turkey, Kranthor definitely has some kinks that need some fixing. The band has just released their new album, entitled “Abandoned By The Gods.” It’s only six tracks long, one being an intro and one being an outro. Most of the songs run for about four to five minutes. It starts out decent but slowly gets harder and harder to listen to.
As the album begins, after an eerie intro of calm haunting guitars, the song “Treason” comes blaring in with a monstrous growl that echoes over the electrifying guitars. This growl will catch your ear immediately with its deafening sound. Unfortunately, it never gets as powerful again throughout the track. The growling vocals try to hit a higher screechy growl through most of the song and really comes no where close to it. It just sounds like a guy with a really sore crackly voice screaming into a microphone. But don’t let this discourage you. The drumming gets pretty intense throughout the track as double bass pedaling takes over most of the song and completely obliterates anything in its path. The guitar riffs are fast and constant not letting you rest for a second. There is a mean solo in the middle of the song that really shows that the lead guitarist of this band mean business. He goes straight into a high flying solo that send crazy melodic notes flying all over the place.
“When The Forsaken Spirits Awake” opens with dual guitars that are full of dirty distortion playing a dark, demonic riff that seems to be pretty catchy. However, then the guitars break into this plain riff that runs throughout the verse and honestly, will start to put you to sleep. Adding a different melody or a different instrument would have kept this track a little more refreshing. The middle of the song has a quickly little bridge that has a somewhat catchy tune. You might find yourself slowly starting to bob your head here. You’ll soon snap out of it as soon as that boring guitar riff kicks back in. The quiet guitar solo in the end is the only good part in this song and that only runs for about 20 seconds in this five minute long song. Something needs to change here.
You start to hear some pretty sick double bass pedaling in “Heathen.” The guitars are rocking pretty loud as well. Things seem like they are off to a good start until the vocals come in. The verse sounds like they took a song from Amon Amarth and tried to rerecord it as off tempo as possible. The vocals don’t match any of the guitars that are chugging in the background nor do they compare to the drum beats. It gets even worse when the guitars start to repeat this one simple riff in the middle of the song as you can clearly hear the guitars fall behind the drumming. I don’t know how anyone could have been satisfied with this performance after recording it. Somehow the solo in the end manages to keep up perfectly to drum rolls and holds somewhat of a strong finish. The solo runs up the scales repeatedly for a good amount of time. This is probably the most impressive part of this whole album.
“The Longest Night Of The King” is probably the most aggressive song on the album. It starts out slow with quiet acoustic riffs that are followed by a lightly distorted guitar. As this fades out you then run into a monstrous guitar riff that really compliments the album. After everything else that was played earlier, you wouldn’t expect such a solid guitar riff like this one. You’ll definitely want to pump your fist to this one. The growling vocals are still pretty weak throughout the song. Perhaps some heavy reverb could help out. The only other issue with this song is that they never change the melody. The same guitar riff plays through the entire song except for the last minute and this is a six minute song. A little more creativity would do the trick.
Judging by some of the performances, Kranthor definitely needs to sharpen up on some of their work. With certain rhythmic guitars sounding off and weak vocals that just keep getting weaker, they really need to step it up if they want to make it in the world of metal. Some of the song structure is there and the band definitely has some potential with their lead guitarist, but this isn‘t a band that I am rushing to see live anytime soon. “Abandoned By The Gods” needs a lot of cleaning up, both quality wise and performance wise.
5/10
Myspace - http://www.myspace.com/kranthor
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