Sweden has been one of the leading countries alongside America when it comes to extreme music, especially death-metal. One band in Sweden is called
Hypocrisy, the front man and world known producer
Peter Tägtgren has been very successful in his musical career. He has been playing in death-metal bands, grindcore, industrial and even black-metal projects, but most of these side projects has been created by this man, he has created his most successful band
Hypocrisy, his one-man crew industrial project called
Pain and he has or had a black-metal project called
The Abyss (which is the same name as his own studio
The Abyss Studio). This review will be focusing on his black-metal project, he formed it with the same crew members while he was on full throttle with
Hypocrisy. The band was played by the trio,
Tägtgren,
Hedlund and
Szöke, but the big difference in this band is that the members has changed instruments but
Tägtgren is still the main vocalist. They were focused on old-school black-metal, played in a very fast pace and they did it very good too, not my style of music but this sounds like black-metal though.
This album is their second and probably their last, this album is called
Summon The Beast and it was recorded in 1996, the band was created in 1994 and they became inactive after the second album. Anyway, this album only delivers high-speed black-metal with typical black-metal raspy vocals. This would sound like early
Mayhem, this does not sound like the Norwegian bands like
Emperor or
Dimmu Borgir. The material feels very repetitive, the songs sounds quite identical to each other, the only thing that’s makes a small difference is the ‘’feel’’ in every song. Some of the songs feel more depressive than others, some feels more chaotic and others feel more haunting. This is black-metal so don’t expect any beautiful lyrics, this is all about death and darkness, and of course Satanism and anti-religious themes.
Mikael Hedlund / Lars Szöke – Usually bassist and drummer of
Hypocrisy but this time they were guitarists, the overall guitar work is very intense and the riffing is very repetitive. There are no high-tech riffs here; I don’t know what technical stuff is in black-metal since I never listen to black-metal. But the riff lines appear to be very simple, the riffs is just played over and over again in a rapid speed. I still think that they are doing a great job on this album so they both will be given a:
4/5 (excellent)
Peter Tägtgren – Vocalist and drummer in this band, he is taking care of the drumming in this project and he does an incredible performance. He is usually playing the guitars and keyboards but I didn’t know that he was this good at high-speed drumming. The drum patterns have though a poor variety in my opinion, there is basically one single pattern in every song. There is of course some drum rolls here and there and other sudden beats and poundings but there is always this non-stop machine-gun pounding or kicking. The vocals are very typical black-rasp, there are some screams here and there but most of the time there are these raspy vocals. There is a bass in this band here as well and that is also done by
Peter, the bass is though very clear and somewhat loud. The bass does shines through and it makes a pretty cool sound in this musical chaos, there is no particular heaviness but you can hear that there is a bass here. His vocals gets a
3.5/5, his drumming gets a
5/5 and his bass performance will be given a
4/5.
I have finally heard all the bands that
Tägtgren has been playing in, I still prefer
Hypocrisy above everything else, this was not my style of music because I have red so much about black-metal which just disgusts me. But I still think that the guys did a great musical performance, but I still think that this was not totally flawless. Some things I liked about this album was the incredible speed that the band delivered, another thing was that the members did great with other instruments. I thought at the beginning that this was going to be something similar to
Hypocrisy, which was both a surprise and disappointment. The vocals were good and the clear bass was definitely a surprise, that’s what I thought well about. The bad things was the fact that the album felt so repetitive, every song felt similar to another, there was only this ‘’feel’’ or sound that made the songs a bit different. I found that songs quite boring just because of this, but this was my first old-school black-metal experience and this is what I felt about it.
Time for my last words, not my favourite
Tägtgren project. It was a pretty good time of listening but this is nothing I would just pop in my stereo and just listen to, I’m pretty sure that I will never pay attention to this in the future too. I see black-metal more like some sort of religion while other people see it like music; black-metal people will definitely enjoy this I’m pretty sure. If you happened to be a very die hard fan of
Hypocrisy or a overall fan of
Tägtgren’s you could give this a listen. Thank you for taking time to read this review, I hope you had a good time reading it and I hope this was a good guidance.
I have no personal favourites from this album, but if I should recommend something it would probably be
The Arrival,
Feasting The Remains Of Heaven and
Blessed With The Wrath Of Evil. I can’t see this as a average performance so I will give this a:
3/5 (good)
