Tuesday 14 May 2013

Deathevoker - Towards Nothingness



DEATHEVOKER - Towards Nothingness (ENVENOMETAL - CD 2013)
Death metal from Malaysia? Well, I honestly must say I am not so fond of most of the bands from this region of the world – with few exceptions like Impiety, Thorns of Hate and few Japanese bands, most of them is just bad and uninteresting… They usually suffer for bad production and really a strong lack of any good ideas and songwriting and usually just bore me to death with the primitiveness and infantilism of the music they play. I have a lot of respect for many die hard metal maniacs from the Asian countries, but usually it just doesn’t go in hand with good music. Recently I got few releases of Malaysian bands and first one, which I decided to give a listen to, is this new CD release from Deathevoker. I must say that I have never heard about this band before, but it certainly looked very, very promising. Why? Well, just fuckin take a look on the band’s logo – killer! – and on that excellent and fuckin impressive artwork, which is on the “Towards Nothingness” CD. It reminds me some classic death metal releases like Dismember demos and I must say that the guy, who’s responsible for the whole artwork (Ironworx Gravefix) did truly an eye catching and awesome job here. I love his style, the sketches of all those zombies, skulls, slimes and other creepy things… ha, classic death metal artwork and surely one of the best I have seen lately.
But don’t judge the book by its cover… the artwork for “Towards Nothingness” for sure is great, but what about the music? Well, Deathevoker is very inspired by the old death metal bands, mainly those European ones, like classic bands from Finland and Sweden… their sound is quite close to the traditional productions of the old demos from those countries, but without actually being a copy of the Sunlight Sound, maybe it is more similar to the old Unisound or something… Anyway, I like the production of “Towards Nothingness” demo and must say that instantly Deathevoker hit my G spot of musical taste and I liked their music. It is nice to hear a good band from such an exotic country like Malaysia and more so, one which really knows how to play some killer death metal tunes… and I bet that all of you, who like old death metal demos from the countries which I mentioned above – of bands like Nihilist, Dismember, Entombed, Demigod, Amorphis, Grave, etc – will also like this CD. There are some really killer riffs, some nice melodies also and so my general feeling about the whole material is very positive and I am very happy to hear this band. Maybe the weakest thing of the whole “Towards Nothingness” are the vocals, which could have been better, maybe more brutal and have more guts, but they’re not terrible neither, just not totally effective, so I wouldn’t call it a big fault of the demo. All in all “Towards Nothingness” offers three cool songs from Deathevoker and for sure this band is a must have for all the collectors of underground old school death metal.
I wrote that “Towards Nothingness” contains three songs… and this is the demo 2013, but this CD version, which I have – released by Envenometal Records, limited to 500 copies – contains “Eternally Rot” demo from 2012 as a bonus. This one has four tracks and maybe doesn’t sound as good as the second demo, is slightly messy and more obscure, but it still has similar style of music and similar attitude of rotten old school death metal. Nice! Remember then that Deathevoker is definitely one of the best metal bands from Asia for now!
Standout track: “Towards Nothingness”
Final rate: 70/100

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