Hailing from the city of Jerusalem,
Melechesh was founded back in 1993 by guitarist and vocalist Ashmedi. Besides
him, Scorpios (bass), Moloch (guitar) and Lord Curse (drums) complete this
albums line-up. Not that the music is a lot different from their 2010 album with
2 different members and that is because Ashmedi is still the creative brain and
Lord Curse was already member in the early Melechesh years. I'm not a fan of the
extreme (what real black metal fans call black metal) music, but the style
Melechesh plays has my approval. The production is good and the drum sound
reminds me a bit of Enslaved in their 'Frost' period.
The
music still has the black metal roots, but they bring in a lot of other elements
as well. Besides the Eastern parts, there are also influences of thrash and
traditional metal. Fortunately the songs are not only ultra fast with only
blastbeating rhytmns, but there are a lot of slower pieces with a certain groove
as well. "Enki Divine Nature Awoken" is one of the tracks with nice thrash riffs
and some fine guitar tunes. The rather elaborated songs don't really bother me,
but perhaps a single track would even be better taking 1 minute less. "Doorways
to Irkala" is a soft instrumental track with oriental rhytmns and non metal
instruments, for me this song doesn't add a lot to this album and with 8 minutes it
is 5 minutes too long. Lucky enough the last song compensates a lot. After a
long mid-tempo part, the track accelerates towards the end with some fabulous
blastbeating parts blowing everything to pieces. As icing on the cake, there are
some guest musicians on this album namely; Rob Caggiano, Max Cavalera and Sakis
Tollis.
Ashmedi shows that his typical oriental style of writing songs makes Melechesh a
rather unique band in the black metal genre.
