Dark Oriental metal, blackened death metal, doom/death metal…. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many erroneous descriptions of a band’s music floating around. Certainly none of those would be helpful here on this, a re-recording of old Bilocate tracks with a couple of others thrown in for good measure. Hailing fromJordan, it is a wonder this music has surfaced at all, never mind twice.

According to interviews with the band they were at one point asked to cease playing by Jordanian ‘security’ and apparently felt they had little choice but to comply. They were also blocked from entering Italy, thus ruining part of their European tour a couple of years ago, because officials thought it was part of a plan by the band to abscond Jordan altogether. Hardly surprising, even if that were true, given the blocks metal music seems to have in the country. Anyway, whether because of or in spite of their trials and tribulations, the band has managed to tour across Europe and with their own brand of synth-led, meandering melodeath.

The album begins with an Oriental flourish in The Tragedy Within, clearly one of the band’s standards. But from there the Oriental flavour mostly gets watered down and there is nothing quite so addictive as you’ll find among bands such as the more intense Melechesh or the more progressive Orphaned Land. But neither are Bilocate challenging any genre definitions as the apparent confusion over an appropriate pigeonhole for their sound might suggest. Summoning The Bygones is a fairly straightforward affair. Regular stop-start switches from bouncing power riffs to navel-obsessed interludes (including a cover of Paradise Lost’s Dead Emotion from their classic Gothic) are the order of the day and one that might have benefited from a bit more restraint in light of the new more polished approach to the sound. The clean-as-a-whistle production, perhaps grooming the clearly competent band more towards the metal mainstream, has stripped out some of what I suspect would have attracted fans to their early sound. Disphoria in particular, the 2005 album from where most of these tracks were taken, has a nice rough, blackened edge with dark, gothic passages helped along by the heavily accented singer (an accent that also seems to have been edited down somewhat). What’s left is a more power-oriented Opeth and sure to be a hit with anyone who likes their melodic death metal with most of the death sucked out of it.

(6/10 Reverend Darkstanley)

 http://www.bilocate.net