Review by Jeger on January 29, 2025.

On the brink of the spiral do we who have not yet taken the final plunge drift. Swirling over the passing years of our steady inglorious demise in vessels of depression, frustration and anger as realizations of life's many deceptions are solidified through each season of suffering. Sounds pretty black metal. Actually, it sounds very post-black metal, which is exactly what this is. Black metal, but more cathartic and beholden to varying outside influences that are generally distant from black metal. Panopticon, Harakiri for the Sky, The Spirit and Vintras are a few of the predominant names that are spearheading the movement. The latter will release their debut Timescarred LP on March 27 via Void Wanderer / War Productions.

Music that is as hopeless and crafted with as much tunnel vision as Mgła: focused, honed and locked into the task at hand - the manufacturing of misery in the form of song, but with a remarkable silver lining. The titular track unfolds to all of those familiar depressive melodies and exudes similar levels of nihilistic cachet, but as we venture in further, we find ourselves set adrift over the fog upon grande majestic passages; voluminous compositions that draw from deep within the gut the faintest sense of hope just before we're plummeted back to surface level at melancholy's mercy. Like the feeling of dread you feel once the victim in a horror flick is captured again after making her daring escape only to be returned to the torture block for cleansing.

Youth is wasted on the young! And once we get to a certain age, life is nothing more than a struggle against the tide. We know it's coming but we try to distract ourselves from it as best we can through shit like work, partying, social media and the reveling in our many accomplishments, but it's right there in the mirror… We're dying and no one gets out alive. This sense of impending doom and of deathly foreshadowing is thick here in the throes of Timescarred. Even as accessible as tracks like "The Wretched Wanderer" can be, there's just no escaping the existential dread of it all, the weight of the matter. Heavy and rhythmic, anthemic and just massive - too bold to be labeled anything close to true black metal. Transcendent! Yet grounded enough to where you have no choice but to take it heavily to heart.

Bands like Vintras and individuals such as ourselves aren't fucking fooled. We are here to suffer. Even as we do whatever it is we're doing right in this very moment, we are suffering in some way. The world is not a beautiful place and there is no escaping the inevitable. We simply ride the snake through varying levels of depression, anxiety and false hope until we reach the end of the line. I wouldn't wish life on anyone… I would encourage you to listen to Timescarred. Like a dance with despair under silver moonlight or a glass of wine with death is this record and every bit as romantic. A toast! To your remaining years. May they be full of ignorant bliss instead of staunchly conceived realizations of future suffering and grim death. And here's to Vintras - a proud new entity on the UK post BM scene. Very powerful debut.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Review by Greg on June 25, 2024.

Can Serbia ever run out of killer thrash metal bands? While I'm too busy finding more and more of them to think of an answer – wait, maybe that should be enough to make me tend towards a 'no' – here is another addition to that still indefinite list, although off to a rather unimpressive start. Kobold is the brainchild of mastermind Elio Rigonat, who I'm expecting to be a peculiar character under many aspects, and his voice couldn't help but follow suit, I guess. Now, we're talking about a band I hold in the highest of regards in terms of originality, so it saddens me to reduce the whole stuff to a make-or-break experience with the vocals, but, well, his extremely John Connelly-esque inflection can really result insufferable in the long run, meaning it's gonna be the most divisive feature of this debut Death Parade – of all their albums really, but here he's even more unrestrained and (spoiler alert) it's the only one where there isn't a shitload of boner-worthy material to make up for it, which surely makes a huge difference, in the grand scheme of things.

Although the man is also in charge of the guitars, and it's another story altogether. More than the solos, channeling the over-the-top shredding of the late Mike Scaccia (not least due to the absence of the rhythm guitar) but lacking a great deal of variety, it's the riffs that shine, thanks to their certain off-kilter quality he always manages to convey. Even in such an early, unrefined phase, tracks such as the first three, or later highlight 'Thrill For Speed' still offer that extra oomph necessary to stand out from the pack. The immediately recognizable massive guitar crunch of Luka Matković's Citadela Studios is also an undisputed plus for a debut album, for sure... although the other side of the coin is the just as predictable prominent space awarded to the vocals.

Death Parade's biggest downside, though, isn't the vocal performance. Many of its songs are fired at extremely similar tempos and are basically indistinguishable, to the point that the middle songs are honestly tiresome to sit through after all that came before. And 54 minutes are waaay too many under these premises, although they give the album time to switch to a mostly speed-esque, Ranger-meets-early Fog of War vibe you might have been expecting from the last mentioned title above, approximately from 'Ministry Of Propaganda' onward, and the Exciter cover at the end finally makes perfect sense. Given that Kobold have become personal synonyms for interesting as fuck thrash metal, it's quite a pity. Maybe it needed a little more time in the oven, to axe some of the most similar tracks and maybe attempt something more different... more often. Yeah, because the formula does vary at some point, but so much and so abruptly that it almost sounds like another band was featured. Indeed, 'I, Icarus' is an infectious ultra-melodic number with everybody taking a step back and letting the guitar lines speak, for once, with Rigonat even, gasp, singing? Conversely, 'When the Eyes Turn Inwards' is a decidedly more blackened number. Sounds strange? It really shouldn't, since both are tropes that would be put to full use in subsequent albums, but sure, here they're no more than a pair of very good outliers, that also have the side effect of making the return to several more conventional tracks feel like a merciless, inevitable decline.

Overall, Death Parade would be a decent first album for many bands around, but you can believe me when I say it's a rather underwhelming experience, with the hindsight of the three (as of this writing) works that followed. The first half warrants a listen, and I'm seriously considering putting 'I, Icarus' in my ever-growing car playlist, but if you were to listen to a single Kobold album in your lifetime – well I wouldn't envy you but who knows – make it one of the others.

Rating: 6.4 out of 10