Anubis Gate

Andromeda Unchained

Written by: ASH on 11/08/2007 16:09:02

Unsurprisingly, the music at the Danish metal venues has increased in popularity, quality and musical originality. Anubis Gate is not an exception, having shown development in all of these three factors. With their third and newest album "Andromeda Unchained", they're in for yet another episode of their musical career. Lucky for me, I've got a whole vacation to spend on this release, so I've got loads of free time to work my way through this hard-packed fifteen-track heavy metal experience without getting disturbed by parties, friends and my girlfriend...oh, the irony.

More seriously though, the album starts out with a short ambient track called "Freak Storm At Post Zeta...One Child Missing...". The futuristic and militaristic sounds of possibly a reconnaissance team walking through a completely destroyed city, looking for a missing child, really sets an atmosphere worth digging into. The only drawback is that these atmospheric tracks, which are found throughout the album, seem to tell a story for themselves and do not perfectly correspond with the real musical tracks on the album. It's like being close, yet still far away from the whole concept of the album. The real tracks though, are something out of the ordinary. Anyone could've used some recycled heavy metal chords and let the drummer do all the work, leaving the singer to only tell some vile story. But a distinguishing trait about "Andromeda Unchained" is especially the innovative use of jungle-like drums, drawing some distant similarities to those by Soulfly. It works great in the second track "Snowbound". In all aspects, ranging from the riffs to the vocals, everything here works nicely and powerfully. Even though it's pretty easy to spot out the quirky Danish pronunciations of the band's English lyrics, Jacob Hansen does a good job on the album as the band's new vocalist, so no hard feelings there.

The main underdog of this release though is that it has way too many tracks, which inevitably exhausts the listener, especially when the average length of tracks is approximately five to six minutes, excluding the atmospheric intermissions. This becomes especially clear on the thirteenth track "The End Of Millennium Road". Ten minutes! That's a harsh amount of heavy metal solos and Søresen's beating the shit out of the cans to throw towards the end of an album! This could be something great to see live, but not something to throw on an album. Sadly, this as a whole makes the album seem a little repetitive and boring at times, which is really a shame considering the band's intriguing style. To me, "Andromeda Unchained" could easily just have consisted of a maximum of ten tracks, leaving out the unnecessary "fat" for later.

Despite all of this, Anubis Gate's upcoming release is something worth checking out, especially if you want to feel the pulsations of the Danish metal scene, since it wouldn't be a surprise to me if we'll be seeing a lot more from these guys in the future. As an album, it really shows many good angles of the band; their powerful energy, impressive lyrical and vocal works and some good musical courage. Just please know when to stop, alright?

7

Download: Snowbound, The End Of Millennium Road, Beyond Redemption
For The Fans Of: Crimson Glory, Fates Warning, Savatage
Listen: MySpace

Release date 20.08.2007
Locomotive Records
Provided by Target ApS

Related Items | How we score?
Comments
comments powered by Disqus

Legal

© Copyright MMXXIV Rockfreaks.net.