Thurisaz
Re-Incentive

Belgian band Thurisaz has been around for quite a while now, the debut album was released in 2003, the band formed in 1997 and this album called Re-Incentive is their fifth. It has a cover that doesn’t reveal much, quite interesting in a way. It says that the band has a good live reputation and that they hope to get on tour to support this new album in a close future, and we along with the band can of course hope that this will be possible soon. But until then we can always listen to Re-Incentive, or can we?

It is a melodic death/doom metal album, perhaps with some avant-garde element. Not really coming up with anything novel or exciting from the creative standpoint. The vocals are pretty typical of the style with croaks and some cleaner chants, the album offers seven tracks that are all pretty long and I think that the playing time well over fifty minutes is a bit much. The album lack both variation and dynamics to sell such a long album, and I think that the production is pretty average as well.

Mediocre, is the word that comes to mind when I think about describing this album – it is not exciting, not fresh, not novel, not funny, not really poor, not bad, not great, a run of the mill production that you can listen to but not really care about. They avoid making a bad album but avoiding that is made by thousands of bands and that isn’t really enough to make a mark or be relevant. Sometimes writing about music makes it seem as though I have lost the love for music as I tend to shrug my shoulders at most of the stuff I get, but I guess it is because the more you hear the less amazing each new release seem to be – and when you are in critic mode you tend to notice the problems more than when just listening. But this album probably isn’t exciting in any regard, only if you have heard very little music.

Re-Incentive isn’t a bad album, it just isn’t a great one. Mediocre release with average songs and average production. There are plenty of albums released this year that are equal to, or better than this one and I really think any of those will be a better choice than this. Thurisaz will need to step back and return to the drawing board as this just doesn’t do it – I doubt this album will be impressive to anyone.

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