Treyharsh, in case you hadn’t heard of them as I hadn’t, have been plying their dark and heavy trade in Northern France and Belgium since 2011. “When the Sun Sets in the East” is their second album.

One thing I very much liked about this album is that it doesn’t waste time with a meaningless intro, but gets stuck in without delay to a rock solid seven and a half minute track “The Family Tree”. Death metal to the core, it carves out a winding path of darkness. The instrumentals are deep and dingy, but noteworthy for tempo changes, and the vocal support is what you’d expect from this sludgy stuff. My only concern was that, having laid down their cards on the table, whether Treyharsh would develop into other areas. This style can be self-limiting. They partly address this with strong technical patterns and again the tempo changes. My imagination was captured with the rumbling thunder of “Brothers and Haters”, but whilst I recognised the harsh power, I found that listening to this was more of a wallpaper than an inspirational experience. Here and there atmospheric passages like at the end of the title track struck me, but the more I listened to this album, the more it seemed to sink into leaden-heavy sludginess without compensation.

“The Taste ov Childhood” has something of what I now realised had been missing – colour and soul. The rhythm line packs a punch and drives it along nicely. At one point it was like listening to Aeternus. Unfortunately “Farewell” drops back to the previous parameters and whilst harsh and crunchy, lacks excitement. “Father’s Bloodbath” starts colourfully but doesn’t lead anywhere, sounding like an experiment. “Deer Woods” has an interesting and coherent pattern, but all in all, very little of this breaks outside the death metal template. There is atmosphere, and the drawn-out “Son ov Sorrows” has the desperate air of Disbelief. The creepy start of “All Those Fool Gods” shows promise, before bursting into harshness. It can’t be faulted for aggressive effort, and there’s a mistily dark spoken section towards the end, but all in all it’s another track, which barely peers out of its own self-defined shell.

I found “When The Sun Sets in the East” a mostly indigestible listen. It’s dark and sludgy, and of course it’s “très harsh”. Technically solid as it all is, it sounds like a lot of death metal bands and ultimately I was looking for scraps in trying to identify the highlights.

(6/10 Andrew Doherty)

https://www.facebook.com/TreyHarshBand