666sharon666 A couple of years after their debut album the Greek female black metal band Astarte were ready to release their follow-up album Rise From Within. The biggest change in the band between the two albums was really just an aesthetic one, as they overhauled their image to drop the use of corpse paint. Though they may not have been using a typical black metal image anymore, the music on Rise From Within continues down the raw early black metal approach that some fans of the genre like to think of as 'true black metal'.

Indeed because musically things haven't changed all that much; Astarte continue with the same symphonic influenced black metal ideas present on Doomed Dark Years here, although there is less of a focus on the symphonic side of the album this time. The album is mostly made up of the title track suite which is a four part series, broken into two sections of the album. The first two subtitled pieces are placed immediately after the opening instrumental Furious Animosity, a song I don't find half as effective as Passage to Eternity from the previous album, while the third part and longest song (for some reason not subtitled like the others) is placed towards the end of the album, following by the slightly differently named closer Risen From Within, which is a non-metal melodic instrumental, ending the album much more effectively than it started.

While the music is praiseworthy overall for the same reasons that I enjoyed their debut so much, especially Rise From Within III, the boring intro song (which is basically just black metal without vocals) drags it down a bit and over the years I've become less inclined to spin Rise From Within than I am Doomed Dark Years out of the two earliest Astarte albums. It's still a very good black metal album despite its flaws, but I'd say it's the weakest that Astarte made in their career.

Attribution: http://metaltube.freeforums.org/astarte-rise-from-within-t3738.html