Livarkahil
Wrath of God

Livarkahil are taking on the wrath of god in a new EP, could be an album when looking at the over 30 minutes playing time. The five track EP is a treat from the band to their fans as it is downloadable for free and for anyone who wants there is a USB release with a lot of extra stuff like tutorials on how to play the band’s songs or something like that. When I received the news mails on this I wondered who the hell would want something like that considering how bad their album Signs of Decay from 2011 was. This one has a similar colour scheme and at least it looks more aggressive than the prior one which frankly was a bit tame. But of course past disasters has no bearing on my opinions on new albums or such, I always look at new things from a fresh perspective and now the turn has come to see if this free release is worth the money.

Musically it is brutal death metal, nothing fancy, new or different. We can hardly call this ground breaking as their musical style has been done for millions of years and billions of albums has been released in the genre already which is something that puts a lot of pressure on new albums in that very genre. It is the classical brutal growling, the classical aggressive guitar abuse and the smattering drums that is predominantly used in this genre and they do it as well as anyone. The sound is angry and brutal, not much in terms of variation and you can call it quite monotonous over the five tracks where three of them are very long with a playing time of over six minutes and as I said a total playing time over 30 minutes.

I would definitely call this better than the predecessor and more brutal in feel while the other one felt tame this one is at least somewhat evil feeling. But it is not giving a sense of a wrath of any god, other than maybe a silly god from some cartoon somewhere but not any omnipotent being. But the problem is that we have heard this before, many times and they do not offer anything that is even close to new or fresh, it is just more of the same and no matter how well you do it you are still just doing the same as everyone else and anyone who isn’t a die-hard fan of the genre is bored with this kind of thing already. Sure they do this quite alright but a day when everything is alright while you have cancer is still not really a good day, is it? it is the same with this one.

So, maybe a decent death metal album with brutality and everything, unfortunately there is no substance here either and despite it being better than the previous album it is not really good anyway. If you don’t believe me you can always download the entire thing for free from the band’s website or so and from that judge for yourself but I am still not really sure that it is worth the money.

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