ARCANE GRAIL - Mysteries Of Ancient Charnel

\r\nArcane Grail is a Russian sextet founded in December 2001 whose past agenda boasts one performance with legendary Austrian death-metal group Pungent Stench. "Mysteries Of Ancient Charnel" is their debut album released in August last year and from this June on ’Mysteries Of The Ancient Charnel’ is distributed in the Netherlands by HDG Distribution. Arcane Grail’s music is melodic black metal with a gothic, symphonic atmosphere along with a variation of vocals from black metal screams, grunts and common vocals to female operatic ones. At some point they deliver a Cradle of Filth essence, then some gothenburg-esque riffs pop up to the surface and after a while you get a pure Within Temptation influence. And the truth is that they try to mix all these kinds of styles yet in the end the only thing you’re managing to absorb is an incomprehensible, chaotic musical confusion. The male death/black vocals stand quite well but the female screams get pretty annoying most of the time rather spoiling the recipe and really hardening the overall hearing of the album. The lyrics from the other hand are very interesting describing certain events which have occurred in second half of XVI century in German district Schwarzwald, some of them real fact-based and other simple imagery. Also the cover of the album is very beautiful but I doubt if this will be a leading factor to the purchase of the album. Ending up there are actually some good ideas hidden behind "Mysteries Of Ancient Charnel" although I hope in their next album they will acquire a more coherent output in their sound and the only troubleshooting has to come with the vocal section and that’s where Arcane Grail should make a second thought about. \r\n

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\r\n\r\nVaso "Necromass" Prassa \r\n

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