Apallic – Of Fate and Sanity

[schema type=”review” name=”Apallic – Of Fate and Sanity” description=”Label: Boersma Records (Soulfood)” author=”Juho Karila” pubdate=”2017-06-02″ ]

Apallic is a death metal quintet from a small northern German town of Emden. The band has been around since 2014 and they got one EP, Somnium (2015) under their belt before releasing their debut album in the summer 2017. Judging by the facts, they have had time refining their style but let’s see how it looks like below the surface.

Fast-paced The Awakening opens the album as the first real track and it consists of some heavy drum and guitar hammering, a true punch-in-the-face straightforward and very energetic song that turns into a chorus almost as suddenly as the whole song begun. Before you even know it, you’ve listened halfway through the song before it kicks out even heavier gear with some black metal blasting. The song is all about aggressive shredding and textbook rhythm guitar riffs with very low growling and double-bass thunder. However it dulls it’s sharpest edge very fast as you realize that it doesn’t offer anything new and actually others have done the same things before and better.

Mental Prison confirms my fear and suspicion, there are no leads to be heard but heavy drumming and rhythm guitars that flirts with black metal. Almost identical to the opening track, there’s not much to add nor to grip on.
Clean acoustic interlude calms the song even more as an etheric guitar lead tries building some sort of an athmosphere to the song but yet it offers nothing.

The third song, Masked Insanity feels like an exact copy of the previous ones and at this point I’ve almost lost my will of listening more.

Days Before the Black breaks the formula and surprisingly sounds like Opeth offering a memorable riff for once, but the joy is short-lived as it turns out there’s nothing under the hollow shell.

Iter Ex Umbra lulls us to The Watchmaker and it feels like the whole album has just reseted with that one instrumental song as the latter is clearly the best track of the whole album. It begins with the same magnitude but the guitar riffing is more mature and seems to be feeding the drums with the groove, lashing eachother for more and more wilder ride. This is a very welcome sign of songwriting prowess and a giant leap compared to the before.

Some things are best left to the rehearshing place or to home-demos and sadly this album is one of them. It feels like they have studied the most basic techniques and the minimum amount of practise what it takes to found a band.
I spent hours listening to this record but I didn’t get much out of it, and I feel sorry for them. The massive sound wall isn’t enough to carry the mood throughout the album and with only a drop of originality, they still have a long way to go in making a name for themselves.

It’s not about their skills, I don’t believe they couldn’t do better, but the next time, I’d want to hear little more effort in the arrangements.

Lineup:
Kristian – Bass
Klaas -Guitar
Frank – Guitar
Dennis – Drums
Eike – Vocals

Tracklist: 01. Iter Initium 02. The Awakening 03. Mental Prison 04. Masked Insanity 05. Days Before The Black 06. Deranged 07. Iter Ex Umbra 08. The Watchmaker 09. Leaking Hourglass 10. A Taste Of Lethe

Links:
Facebook
Official