2006-05-04
Pershing Mankind are a young death metal band hailing from Austria, who’s this is their debut release, they create mid-tempo, melodic death metal which, admittedly, does not infuse anything new into the genre, but they can certainly hold their own with good, quite catchy death tunes.
Its quite strange to me that a band as young as this owes so much to old school death metal, its on the sound and also in some of the riffs, they have some
In Flames influences and clean vocal parts that bring to mind the more modern melodic death bands, but the overall feeling here is of old school death metal, something which I certainly approve of.
A thing that might be something of a novelty is that the band has a female drummer, Beate, which besides being good looking can also drum as good as any capable male drummer I heard, way to go girl!
The album starts off well with “Nox”, pretty straight forward melodic death metal, the sound could have been a bit more polished but it does not hurt the band, there's some nice groove going on here, one thing, though, the growled vocals are much better than the clean ones, which are nice, but not brilliant. “First Fallout”, the second track, is faster and uses the same basic structure of growl/clean vocals.
“No One” is one of the better tracks on the album, some acoustic guitars that blend in with the metallic riff, it's on the verge of goth metal and does bring some more variety to the band's pallet. The basics remain the same throughout the album, not too much diversity but they manage to carry on good songs, “Last Exit” is another song that stuck, fine
At The Gates like riffing, again, fine growling, another winning track.
These young dudes need some experience, and maybe finding more of their own identity, but this is still a well realized and well played, with some truly good songs, with a better sound and a more independent style, this band certainly should be going somewhere.
Alon Miasnikov
