Stormhold - The Lost World (Total Metal Records, 2013)

 

Genre: Melodic Death Metal

Year: 2014

Country: Belarus
Tracklist:

1.	Wind of Freedom	06:05
2.	Another Day	05:34
3.	The Understanding of Truth	04:43
4.	Eyes in the Eyes	04:58
5.	Our Blood's on the Cross of War	04:04
6.	The History Pages	05:28
7.	Inside My Mind	04:32
		35:24

Review:

Here is a country you don't hear that much metal from, Belarus!

From the start with Wind Of Freedom we hear a drummachine which does not give me a lot of confidence. I prefer real drums with my Death Metal.
Luckily the first track is the weakest on the album and things pick up a bit after that.
Stormhold plays Melodic/Symphonic Death Metal in the vein of Dark Tranquility, At The gates etc. but never really reaches that potential. The popularity of the genre is not as big as it was during the early 2000s, so it will have to compete with more metalcore releases then pure melodic death releases which might be a good thing for the band. On a technical aspect the cd is really badly mixed, the volumes of some songs are really different making me put my speakers higher and lower the whole time.
My favorite track is Another Day, which is a very aggressive fast song. Maybe in the future the band need to downplay the keyboard a bit and focus more on the aggressive part of their music. Also please invest a bit in a better mix.

About the booklet, it's just your run of the mill lyrics with photos of the band, nothing more and not really printed on high quality paper. The artwork is not really something special as well, a skull with some floating bullets photoshopped on it, I don't really get it.

 A very cool thing however is that because the album is only 35 minutes long they have printed their logo, faces and the skull on the backside of the cd! Now that is something I haven't seen a lot before. Well done for that. (See image above).

All in all it's a very mediocre release that only collectors of Melodic Death Metal should check out.

Rating:


Where to buy:
Here