Apostate
Time of Terror

It is a time of terror when we are dealing with the second album by Ukrainian band Apostate, a blackened doom band that released their debut demo as far back as 1995 but times has been turbulent and the band has split up, reunited and changed members. Only one member remains the same, Alexander Kostko the bass player and he has a completely new line up around him for this, the Unkranian band’s second album. Judging by the cover it looks like an evil creation that brings on death and evilness to the world – something like that.

Musically it is rather dark, kind of evil in appearance, at least in one way of looking at it. The music is built in large sweeps, not much room for diversity and complexities, fairly slow and quite heavy sound. I would describe it as kind of raw. The production is very old fashioned and the vocals are growly, but there are some spoken word parts breaking it all up with quotes that should be familiar. The growlist is not a very good growlist, the growled vocals are actually quite poor. All songs are long and slow moving, the five tracks have a total playing time of 54 minutes and none of the songs are shorter than nine minutes. That can be seen as a bit excessive one might conclude, but if the songs are good that will be no problem.

And there are some interesting angles of attack; I did think it was kind of interesting at my first play through the album. The more you listening to the album, the more painful it gets to endure the vocals – the vocals are really a major weakness of this album. The long playing time and the rather monotone structure is another problem I find with the album and in the end I can conclude that I don’t really like it at all. I think fans of the dark more primitive form of doom/black metal will probably find this album quite appealing, don’t find it appalling but neither do I find it joyous.

Nothing on this album is particularly appealing but fans of the similar bands and the genre will probably enjoy this album, but I can’t be certain of that. For me and probably for those who likes the same kind of music as me will probably find it pretty unappealing with slightly torturous vocals.

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