Atavisma / Maur - Buried in the Ethereal

ATAVISMA / MAUR - Buried in the Ethereal (ATAVISM Records MC 2015)

The music on this split cassette was quite a surprise to me, since up to this moment I thought that Atavism Records will deal with black metal bands only, as they did so many times before. But meanwhile here’s a death metal release from them! Nice one! And what’s more, this cassette is a split, which has one non-French band, what breaks the concept this label had (and which aimed to release bands from the Bourgogne region only) even more haha. Anyway, I don’t care where these two bands are from, what music they play, as long as I like it. And damn it, this may be my favourite Atavism release since Nefastt’s “La malignité des asters” and Avitum’s “MMXIV”.

It starts with Atavisma from France, who I already know from the excellent “Where Wolves Once Dwelled” demo. This was great release, with doomy death metal in the vein of Eternal Darkness. New song titled “A Subterranean Life” is great also, I must say. They keep on playing similar stuff, but I feel like this new track is even more doomy, mournful, more obscure and gloomy as fuck! It is really crushing, atmospheric, slowed down and massive heavy death metal. Great deep vocals, slowly crawling riffs, sepulchral aura and even a small trace of melody in one fragment of this long, but excellent song. Yes, definitely Atavisma is a band worth of the support and I hope to hear more of such killer stuff from them soon.

And Maur was quite a surprise for me, especially as I don’t usually have good opinion on bands from countries like Indonesia. But Maur did a nice job on their track titled “Portrait of the Old Souls”. It sounds more melodic when compared to Atavisma, I can even smell a bit of old My Dying Bride in the guitar harmonies they play, but the vocals are more like blackish shriek. One problem with this song is that it sounds a bit sloppy here and there and generally it sometimes lacks a touch more to really impress, especially towards the end tension goes away. You know, it is not easy to keep a long track interesting all the way through, with good ideas, etc., but Maur did good job anyway. And surely it may be the best band from Indonesia that I know haha!

Final rate: 75/100