Reviews: SAT346
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On April 22nd Satanath Records (Georgia) and The Ritual Productions (Netherlands) will co-release Forlorn Reign, the third album by the Swedish death metal band Circle of Chaos. It comes a long eight years after the band’s second full-length, and represents the work of a changed line-up in pursuit of a new musical direction for the band, one that’s more extreme and aggressive and brings elements of black and thrash metal into the mix.
As a prime example of what the new album holds for listeners, we present the band’s official music video for a venomous, vicious, and preternatural track named “Purgatory“.
In just shy of four minutes Circle of Chaos pack a lot of dynamic sensations into the song. True to their name, they create fire-storming chaos through blasting drums, feverishly demented tremolo’d riffing, and howling vocal madness. They also erupt in sudden start-stop bursts that sound like the discharge of military weaponry. Through slow dissonant arpeggios, they create eerie and sinister moods. And they embellish the music with wailing and wriggling guitar solos that are exotic and enticing.
The drumming adds to the song’s many facets, booming and obliterating, segueing into measured hammer blows, and exploding in acrobatic fills, backed by a bass that rumbles and thunders. Throughout the song the vocals are savage and imperious, like a rabid animal that’s master of all it surveys.
In short, it’s a thriller of a song that merits the labels’ comparisons of the music to Bloodbath and Aeon, and it seems to capture the place for which the song is named — an unearthly place of purification through suffering. Forlorn Reign was mixed and mastered by Jari Lindholm, and features ghastly cover art by JRMR Artworks.
https://www.nocleansinging.com/2022/04/11/an-ncs-video-premiere-circle-of-chaos-purgatory
Swedish band Circle Of Chaos are out with the album "Forlorn Reign", and extreme metal is the style explored on this production. This is a take on the form with a closer relation to thrash metal, and the band will also lapse into thrash metal oriented escapades from time to time here. But the more hard hitting, high pace and high intensity sections are dominant traits, with circulating and fluctuating patterns alternating with hammering and chugging sections with and without impact riffs present. The vocals are of the harsh variety, as is to be expected, and the overall sound of the band is a rich and meaty one. The guitar solo runs tend to be flowing and elegant, and occasionally we are treated to some gentler impulses where the musicians gets to showcase their musicality in a very different manner too. A very well produced album that due to this fact alone should have a fairly wide appeal, and then among those who tend to favor bands that blend thrash metal elements into an extreme metal orientation first and foremost.