Time Signature I'll bless you...

Genre: black metal

There is a lot of good black metal coming out of France these days. While a lot of French black metal bands seem to be taking the avant-garde road, Cruxifiction make their music interesting by drawing on more traditional genres of heavy metal.

Of course, the genre-defining features are there, such as the blastbeats, the tremolo picking, the intense harmonies and the harsh vocals. However, the music on this release is also saturated with elements from trash metal and more traditional metal, and there are passages that sound almost like a kind of dark power metal (that is, with the melody but without all the cheese and infused with black metal elements). The listener can look forward to a couple of almost classic metal style guitar solos and melodic leads. There are also passages that sound like certain types of technical death metal.

This certainly is a quite varied album, and there are a lot of more things going on in the individual tunes than what one might be used to in more run-of-the-mill black metal. I quite like this variation, though.

Some people distinguish between dark metal and black metal, and, while this is a quite melodic affair with a lot of variation, I would still say that it falls on the black metal side, as black metal still is the base sound.

The album is full of pure black metal evil, to be sure, but it will probably appeal more to black metal fans who do not mind a bit of variation and influence from other genres than to hardcore purist blackmetallers.