### Darkness Ablaze: Darkness ablaze

#### 08/06/09 || GardensTale

Intros generally suck. Some are worse than others, but generally they are really fucking snoozeworthy. No exception here. A piano playing a really, really boring 6 note line over and over again. Aren’t intros meant to give the listener a good first impression? There are some good intros, just look at Haggard’s latest.

Anyway, after we skip to track two, we suddenly get a piece of melodic black/death that has a few nice ideas here and there. Good production, melodic guitar lines, repetitive drumming, an even mixture of growls and screams, some keyboards chipping in here and there, blah-dee-blah-dee-fucking-blah. Truth of the matter is, we’ve heard it all before. There’s really not much reason to go to the store and pull out your hard-earned money to add this thing to your collection, even though it’s not annoying or bad and a lot of it is a decent listen. As background music. From your mp3-player.

Not all of it though. Darkness Ablaze have a nasty habit in overusing the keyboards whenever they’re used. They’re not used all the time, but when they are, they completely overwhelm the rest of the music and start scraping out your ear canal. See the album intro and the instrumental intro to “Ascending from ashes”. Great title, by the way. If you’re 12.

So far the review is turning out more negative than these guys deserve though. It’s their debut, by the looks of their Metal Archives page most members are pretty inexperienced at it too, and I can forgive newbies a couple of fuckups. And considering this is a beginning band, it’s really not a bad album, as I said. The main part of “Ascending from ashes” has a really neat guitar line towards the end. They’re clearly aiming for a dark and evil sound, and manage quite nicely at that.

Well, I’m not in a band and don’t play an instrument, but from the almighty throne of a Global Domination writer, I feel like I can give these guys a few tips. Darkness Ablaze, I challenge you to either fire your fucking keyboard player or have him use it –extremely- subtly instead of having him cut into the middle of a song trying to replace the guitars. It sounds like shit, and loses you points. Instead, aim low. Go for a less is more approach. I think you can do some good shit if you have the balls to toss the pretense and just play some solid fucking metal. I’m looking forward to hear your stuff if you make that grade.

6,5 band members fired to improve the music out of 10.

- Information
- Released: 2008 (Self-released in 2007)
- Label: Black Bards Entertainment
- Website: www.darkness-ablaze.de
- Band
- Theodoros “Theo” Georgitsaros: vocals
- Christof Lorenz: guitar
- Alexander “Ali” Huber: guitar
- Jens Podzierski: keyboard
- Christian “Chris” Jaworski: bass
- Sascha Beul: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Intro
- 02. Lonely I march
- 03. Dance of fire
- 04. Black rainbow
- 05. Ascending from ashes part I
- 06. Ascending from ashes part II
- 07. The demon prevails
- 08. Once called for redemption