This debut album from Germany’s Tranquillizer gets off to a lively start. The greeting is a healthy dose of boisterous melodic blackened death metal. It’s perhaps a contradiction to describe black metal as “jolly” but “Eine Andere Welt” (An Another World) and “Werde zu Staub” (Turn to Dust) are lively with their rampant guitar work and hard-hitting drums. At the same time it’s fiery and harsh, rasping vocals give this action-packed affair that darkened edge. It’s technical and it flows. Listening to “Werde zu Staub” made me think of Varg.
Whilst the mini maelstrom is whipped up, the riff doesn’t change much and I realised that this album needed to go somewhere. What “Des Endes Anfang” (Beginning of the End) did do was to lose its flow and by “Blutrot” (Blood Red) it developed into obscurity and a musical scene of death metal harshness with no apparent direction or purpose. By “Seelenreiter” (Soulrider) the fire blazed impressively again, having picked up with trumpeting epic belligerence. Unfortunately “Seelenreiter” has a secret track, a pointless idea which I thought bands had done away with. All I can say there is that it wasn’t worth waiting thirty minutes for.
There are momentary guitar twists and then there’s the trumpet on “Seelenreiter” but Tranquillizer fail to exploit them and there’s not enough to get hold of. The loftiness of the guitar raises the ante but a couple of tracks apart there was very little to thrill or entice me. Not only was “Des Endes Anfang” disappointing as a whole, but Tranquillizer managed to turn fiery death/black metal into something bland and generally lacking in character or personality.
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