STRIGOI: Abandon All Faith (DEATH METAL): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Guitarist of Paradise Lost (need I remind you?), Greg Mackintosh possesses a sound and a writing that belong only to him, and which makes his presence within a project easily identifiable. Take Strigoi and, for example. As soon as you will hear the haunting guitar chords in the track "Phantom", haunting and escaping from a coal mine, you will recognize the sinister and smoky English imprint. All the more so as he gives free rein to his darkest, most deadly tendencies that Paradise Lost no longer allows him to achieve.

This was already one of the reasons for the existence of Vallenfyre, a cathartic project that Greg had launched after the death of his father, who died of cancer. Three opus later, the guitarist felt it was time to close this extremely personal chapter of his life, but the thirst for heavy sounds, inherited from the Bathory and other Celtic Frost, was not quenched for all that. Hence the setting in motion of Strigoi, born from the ashes of Vallenfyre, from whom he got the live bassist Chris Casket and, as session musician, the Finnish Waltteri Väyrynen, who is also the current drummer of Paradise Lost.

In a way, "Abandon All Faith" picks things up where "Fear Those Who Fear Him", Vallenfyre's testament, left them. Same sound lower than earth, same underground remugles. The album drills the intimate crevices of an ashen death metal with a flayed face. But compared to his previous project, Strigoi unveils a Mackintosh freer in its expression of a brutality as severe as it is hallucinatory.

Crawling into the bowels of "Abandon All Faith", one quickly understands that the musician has imposed no limits on himself. He dips with a morbid blackness as much in the almost punk crust ('Nocturnal Vermin' or 'Throne Of Desigrace') as in the noisy crevice of an industrial wasteland (the icy intro 'The Rising Horde'). As for 'Carved Into The skin', the vault of an abysmal doom, it reminds us that man definitely has no lessons to learn from anyone when it comes to painting territories devastated and washed out by acid rains.

The result is a varied album that ranges from the bludgeoning ('Parasite', 'Iniquitous Rage') to the gloomy excavation ('Abandon All Faith'). Always with haunting guitar lines carved in a mineral darkness ('Plague Nation') and deep throaty vocals that prove once again that, if Mackintosh is probably not a great singer, he's perfect to vomit up this oil slick. Finally, let's not forget to underline the performance of Waltteri Väyrynen whose sprawling strike is part of the demented force that burns in this blast furnace.

Born from the ashes of Vallenfyre, Strigoi doesn't disappoint, built on the stainless know-how of the guitarist of Paradise Lost who finds there a way to cultivate his intact taste for a brutal and sinister death. - Official website

STRIGOI

ABANDON ALL FAITH

NUCLEAR BLAST

DEATH METAL