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Krisiun: The great execution
02/01/12 || BamaHammer
Some bands never change. They disgorge the same album anywhere from three to ten times over the course of their careers, play it safe, cater to their loyal following, and call it a successful career.
Krisiun has always been that band, in my opinion, releasing album after album that simply brings the brutality on every single track. When you opened a case with a Krisiun CD inside, you just knew what you were about to hear. You’d get a healthy dose of really fast blastbeats and really fast guitar riffs with a fairly raw and sometimes lousy (see “Ageless Venomous”) production that sounded like it was just three guys in a studio somewhere, which is exactly what it was.
With “Southern storm,” the band finally meandered off course just a bit and gave us songs with surprisingly varied structures in addition to the relentless death metal onslaught. As it turned out, “Storm” was one of the band’s finest efforts to date. That album didn’t leave my CD player for like a month, and I was anxious to see where they would be headed with their next offering.
Their 2011 album, “The great execution,” is a very decidedly Krisiun album. Within the first minute of the opener (and after a semi-neat acoustic intro), “The will to potency,” you know it’s Krisiun. It’s unmistakable. The rhythm is tighter than your underwear and filled with delicious 100% “Koles-ness.” The production is definitely not terrible either. The guitars sound warmer and fuzzier than a fleece blanket, and for once, Max Kolesne’s drums sound almost natural. As for Alex Camargo’s bass, I assume it’s in there somewhere.
Where this album makes a noticeable departure from those earlier albums that I enjoy so much is in it’s song structure. It sounds like every song is filled to the brim with riffs and ideas, sometimes requiring a mentally jarring sensation of utter concentration just to figure out exactly what is going on within the song and ultimately be able to digest it. However, these guys set themselves apart from a band like Origin by including a massive amount of groove to go along with the brutal and technical side of the attack.
While that sense of variation over the course of the album keeps things immensely interesting, it’s also one of its shortcomings. I feel like the band overindulged with all the ideas they had during the writing process and decided to find a place for every single one of those ideas somewhere on the album. I think this is pretty obvious just by taking a look at the lengths of the songs. Not a single track on this album clocks in at under five minutes. Not one. Looking at “Southern storm,” for example, not a single track clocks in at over five. It’s really astounding. This was a band that I always revered as being one to give you a swift kick in the face and get right to the point, and here they’ve turned into a brutal version Opeth.
If they would have just spent some time to “trim the fat” off some parts of this album, they would have written a truly great album. Instead, “Execution” is just really good but a little long-winded. Just look at the guitar solo about halfway through “Blood of lions.” There are like three distinct and really good song ideas in that solo alone. The title track, too, is a conglomeration of killer riffs where some are just groovier than others. “Descending abomination” has a break at the end where they forced one groovy riff in after stopping another one. I’m not saying I wish it was more repetitive, but every time you change things up, you lose just a little groove.
I also can’t say enough about Moyses Kolesne. The guy is a riff machine, and he sweeps more than a high school janitor. I know it helps that he’s the only guitarist in the band, but everything he does just sounds incredibly tight and precise. Couple that with the innate chemistry with his brothers and it’s easy to see why this guy is one of the absolute best guitarists in death metal today. He always brings the element of groove, even when playing his most brutal riffs, and that’s something many other technical wizards forget.
Ultimately, “Execution” is a really good album that just holds itself back. Its overabundance of ideas, some being great while others not so much, impedes its own progress and makes it a bit of a tough listen. Still, these dudes know how to produce some groovy, quality death metal. However, I still feel like they’re capable of better.
The score probably doesn’t reflect it, but I judged this album a little harder than I would other bands’ output simply because Krisiun is an über-high quality death metal band that needs to be held to higher standard of excellence. That being said, they deliver every time. They have far better and worse albums to their name than this one, but an average Krisiun album still slays.
- Information
- Released: 2011
- Label:
- Website: www.krisiun.com.br
- Band
- Alex Cammargo: bass, vocals
- Max Kolesne: drums
- Moyses Kolesne: guitars
- Tracklist
- 01. The Will to Potency
- 02. Blood of Lions
- 03. The Great Execution
- 04. Descending Abomination
- 05. The Extremist
- 06. The Sword of Orion
- 07. Violentia Gladiatore
- 08. Rise and Confront
- 09. Extinção em Massa
- 10. Shadows of Betrayal
