After my first experience with the Danish thrash-metal band
Artillery I wondered if there were more thrash-metal bands from Denmark, I looked for a while and I eventually found this band called
Invocator. This band is not a unique band but it is not a completely overshadowed band either, this band plays retro-thrash, but you can also say that they are playing a progressive style of thrash-metal. Their album
Weave The Apocalypse is considered to be their best effort yet, but with time the band started to fall apart, most because of disagreements among the band members and musical differences. There was a time when the band was standing still in their production but they released a new album, a comeback album and that album was called
Through The Flesh To The Soul and was performed by a crew of four people. This band is a thrash-metal band but that does not have to mean that these guys plays old good fashion 80’s thrash, their sound is heavy and their material feels a bit futuristic, it does not sound like most of today’s thrash-metal bands. Crunchy and churning guitars and heavy accurate tempos are some of the traits that this album has to deliver.
I think that the positive things in this album is equally as many as the negative things. I guess we can look at the good things first, the things I found good about this album was the guitars to start with. Fast, technical and intensive triplet shredding and of course lots of other types of shredding are found in this album, this band has two guitarists and their overall performance is great. The overall guitar performance is more than great, rhythm sections and lead work is nearly flawless, but the coolest thing about the guitars is their mighty and crunchy overall sound which really shines in this album. A second thing I liked about this album was the overall song material, here you have slower and quite weird songs but then you have these massive, faster and catchier songs. And we have also the incredible
Assassin cover called
Abstract War, a completely flawless cover which is only included on the Japanese album version.
Unfortunately I did not like this album too much though, my reasons for not liking it were the vocals for once, and this is a clear case of love-or-hate vocals. Metal bands has a tendency to have sometimes very odd singers, horrible singers and sometimes very good singers, this singer is stuck in between I would say. I like to call these vocals for ‘’new-age vocals’’, I like to call them that way because the vocals sounds like bad a**, wannabe, high-school students, these vocals are perhaps somewhat unique but these are vocals that you don’t like first time you hear them. But this was not the only problem I found; a second thing was that some songs seemed to have serious problems with their song patterns. Some songs had awesome guitar work but when the drumming enters they nearly butcher the songs, every instrument has good flows but the drum patterns just don’t fit, making the songs into real turn-offs.
These were my reasons why I didn’t like this album so much. Imagine that you are going to open a Christmas present, it is hard on the outside and you start to get very excited, but when you open it you got these soft socks or shirts that you wished never existed. That’s the way I feel about this album, I was really happy when I got it but when I started to listen to it I started to dislike it more and more. But this was not a bad retro-thrash album oh no, this album had some really awesome songs. My personal recommendations would be the following songs:
Writhe In Spit,
Abstract War,
Fire Cleanses All and
Infatuated I Am. I think this album suits thrashers most of all, but if this made you interested don’t let me stop you from listening too it. I think that this was a good album but it had its flaws, the overall album rating will be a:
3/5
