Andrew Danso

It’s one thing to boast fancy production as a selling point for your album, but when it backfires, those preconceptions are catastrophic. This was mastered at the Cutting Room, Stockholm Sweden, (the big boys such as Opeth, Paradise Lost, and Gorgoth all go here for mastering too) yet the entire album sounds cluttered, the vocal is muddled inside guitar frequencies, the guitars themselves sound muddy and the drums feel sticky, as if a machine has just been plotted to rhythmically accompany the riffing.

The music itself is a mash up of progressive death metal. Of the Archangel claim exotic metal an appropriate tagline, but this is far more of the icy uninspired Scandinavian type, than anything of South American origin, and therein lies their problem. All of this misdiagnosis is relevant to the entire release, in that it’s supposed to be something completely different. This is supposed to be an artistic, emotive, punchy and atmospheric conceptual album based on a spiritual book, but on playback this is just another metal album based on a spiritual book, and that’s about it. The Brazilian quartet sound ideas right the way through, but they’re only ideas and are in need of some sort of post-production input. They lack the nous to pull off the widescreen landscape sound, they desperately want to achieve, and slump into a brand of metal that doesn’t have anywhere near the bite it ought to.

5/10 Powerplay issue #129