Archeon
End of the Weakness
Band: Archeon BUY NOW!
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Teenagers Archeon (now Made of Hate) released what can only be described as a debut masterpiece in 2005, and it was re-released by Metal Mind in 2008. Now, to fully appreciate this young band, you must first look beyond the commonly criticized Children of Bodom layer and delve into the master 'riffery' beneath.
The melo-death metal quintet do indeed inherit an element of the signature Bodom sound, particularly from the earlier albums but….is that such a bad thing? With old fans constantly complaining about Bodom's the jump on to the mainstream train with their 5th album 'Are You Dead Yet', surely this is exactly what is needed in the keyboard driven metal scene. Fortunately, the similarities stop at the inclusion of keyboards and basic genre (apart from the disturbing similarity between Bodom front man Alexi Laiho and Archeon/Made of Hate front man Michal Kostrzynski!), because the final result of this album is a cleanly produced, original and exiting album form start to finish. The fast, up-tempo drums and catchy riffs give a thrashy feel to the album with cleverly underlaying keyboard melodies to accompany the strong guitar. Right from the word go with the opening track 'Arising', the keyboards introduce a song full of key changes and suitable guitar squeals every now and then, much like the similarly built up track 'dead world'. Michal Kostrzynski proves his ability to us in each and every song with a mixture of Alexi Laiho like solos and Dimebag Darrell squeals. His growling vocals remind me of those of the band Kalmah. The one slower song on the album 'Queen of the Night' is powerful as well as being probably the most head bangingly heavy song on the album with the main riff pounding in your mind long after the song ends. For me, the only weak song on the album was 'Lost Fool'. The name reviews itself, it's as though they needed a final song to add so they took parts out of all the other songs and bunged them together. However, they even managed to mask this to a certain extent with a great solo at the end! Less well masked though, was the way that the songs 'Ruins of Life' and 'Prayer' are a little bit too similar. It wasn't the best idea then to place them next to each other on the album although as one song, it is a good one! The harmonic phrases in 'Prayer' were good though. Right at the end they have put a nice metal rendition of the classic Hungarian Dance at the end to keep us amused. Overall then…a very good debut album for the young Poles with awesome riffs, pleasant keyboard melodies (although I think they could have used the keyboard a little bit more at times) and insane solos. I would recommend this album to all fans of the mighty metal but it is a must have to fans of Children of Bodom, Kalmah, Arch Enemy and of course, Made of Hate. Lewis Klein
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