Xalpen
Wowk Otrr

A band that calls itself Xalpen, how good can that be? Well, check out the cover, check the album title, check the song titles and then tell me that you still doesn’t know. If you are wondering then I can tell you that this band is from Chile, this is their second EP release and that the band was founded in 2014. I am not sure that I really want to know more than that; I wouldn’t even want to know that.

They are a black metal band of the more primitive kind, a raw black metal band according to the press material. That means some rattling and banging noises combined with some growling and then repeat, the same patterns goes through the entire album and it feels like I am listening to the same stuff as almost any other so-called raw black metal band has to offer. Not exciting. The vocals are not good either, boring growling, perhaps the production that is fairly powerful is the best part of the album as the variation is not much at all, it sounds like they are repeating more or less the same song.

It is not a good album, I would actually describe it as really poor, or bad if you like that description better. There are vocals you can’t make out, there are typical standardised songs and there is nothing to surprise me and there is nothing to really grab my attention. I am bored from the earliest seconds of the album and I just wants to turn it off and throw the songs away after just a minute or so. There are just too many of these albums around in the black metal genre, there is no artistic ambition, there are no ideas and in the end the result is underwhelming at best. Sure there will be one or two persons who find this to be a good album but I doubt that anyone with a decent taste will find this to be much to bother with.

The answer is no, you don’t really need to check out this album, it isn’t really worth it. It is a boring and quite bad album and one that I can recommend that you simply stay away from. There is better musical quality in a construction site or a cement truck than what is being offered here. Toss it into the garbage is what I think, kind of a bad thing for the environment to physical copies of a poor album like this, and especially when it is lacking artistic merit.

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