Dormant Ordeal - It Rains, It Pours

DORMANT ORDEAL - It Rains, It Pours (Self financed CD 2013)

Greg from Godz of War has sent me this CD of Polish Dormant Ordeal and I must say that until recently this band was completely unknown to me. I started seeing quite many reviews of their debut album “It Rains, It Pours” and now I also have a copy of this CD… Well, first of all I must say that seeing the artwork for this album and also knowing its title I expected some sort of doom metal, maybe in the vein of Novembers Doom and Ghost Brigade or if not that, then maybe some melodic death a’la Dark Tranquility… You know, this sort of artwork plus the title immediately gave me such impression, but I was wrong. Surprisingly the music is more or less, but modern technical death metal… brutal, massive, groovy, but there is nothing doomy, nothing melodic about it. So, first point goes to Dormant Ordeal for the surprise. Some more points these Poles get for the musical value of their music, as definitely I can say that – even if this sort of death metal doesn’t belong to my favourites – it is very well composed and performed and certainly the band gets my respect for putting out such solid and very professional piece of music. Even the way Dormant Ordeal has released “It Rains, It Pours” deserves attention – for self financed CD it looks great and the graphical layout is professional and awesome.

But let’s take a listen and see what the music is like… Well, I already wrote that Dormant Ordeal performs modern, technical death metal… imagine then such bands as Gojira, Hate, Behemoth plus a lot of American extreme metal and I don’t only mean Morbid Angel and Hate Eternal (even the vocals remind me those of Eric Rutain… this is what you can hear on “It Rains, It Pours”. And yeah, I already mentioned that such music not necessarily belongs to my favourites, although I do listen to it occasionally. And definitely I can admit that Dormant Ordeal has impressed me. Their music is very intense, very powerful, often it is fast as hell and crushes like bulldozer with some utterly brutal riffs… Luckily the band avoids what I usually hate about such bands – there’s no monotony in their music; “It Rains, It Pours” really has many different layers – technical stuff, slower parts, some harmonious riffs, so you cannot say that the band plays the same stuff through the entire record. And that’s great, you know… even those killer guitar leads give their music another dimension. If I add the fact that “It Rains, It Pours” got really fantastic production – and I just cannot believe that Dormant Ordeal has recorded it in their rehearsal place!!!!! – then it feels like I haven’t got anything to moan about here. Definitely “It Rains, It Pours” is an album, which deserves your attention, as long as you give a damn about more modern kind of death sounds. If you’re into the bands, which I mentioned in this review, then get this CD now. I feel like such albums are a good break from the flood of old school death metal, so definitely I enjoyed it.

Final rate: 70/100