### Darkside: Amber (skeletal journeys through the void)

#### 03/08/07 || Lord K Philipson

Darkside’s a completely unknown band to me. Obviously hailing from Austria and claiming (accordingly to their MySpace page) to have been going since 1991. I wonder why the hell I haven’t heard, or at least heard about, these fuckers before if they have been around for so long. They must be real legendary, I guess. Being from Austria and all, a country very well known for their million of awesome bands, right? Wrong.

Either way, Darkside play (death) metal. I write (death) metal becoz they are trying to do a little more with their music, like incorporating boring acoustic guitars, keyboards and making some songs about 10 minutes, for no reason. But the core is death metal.

Starting off the album with a sample from the most used horror movie in the universe, “Hellraiser” (there’s at least 5 more movies out there to use, you know…), doesn’t exactly impress me to the extent of my cock turning all blue. The quite thin production doesn’t make the material complete justice, but it works. Darkside’s changing shape quite often during the album, from a pretty much full-on death metal unit in opener “Suite In Pain Major” to the more groove-laden “Pillars Of Err” which holds some Middle Eastern influences in the guitar department, reminding me a bit of something that Nile could have done. The slow closer “The burning” shows another side of the lot, which makes it a bit hard to fully understand the band’s direction. And it goes on like this all the way through this disc.

I think it’s safe to say that these guys listen to Morbid Angel, Behemoth, Vader (the vocals are very reminiscent at times) the mentioned Nile and possibly some earlier melodic death metal and thrash, the evidence is all over this disc, together with the already mentioned “not so common in death metal” stuff. And Darkside’s doing ok, though it feels a bit unfocused at times. At a few occasions they really shine (“Devilery”), so it’s a shame the whole album isn’t as good as the mentioned track, then we would have ended up with a killer fucken album. But that’s unfortunately not the case now.

They have the blasts that will appeal to anyone looking for brutality, they have the heavier parts for the ones who are not all about blasts. The Wolf (wow, what a nice name… taxi…) holds a pretty nice growl though it’s lacking variation. One thing that sure doesn’t work, though, are the solos. It sounds like whoever’s playing them thinks he’s real good at it, which I can testify to that he’s not. They sound like (bad) solos for the sake of having (bad) solos. Absolutely superfluous.

Darkside need to work out their formula a bit more for it to work as it should. As it is right now it just feels too much at times. They definitely need to become more precise in their writing.

5,5/10.

- Information
- Released: 2007
- Label: Noisehead Records
- Website: Darkside MySpace
- Band
- The Wolf: vocals
- Pit: guitars
- Peter: guitars
- Daniel: bass
- Lukas: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Suite In Pain Major
- 02. Gods Of Death
- 03. Devilery
- 04. Amber
- 05. The Myth Of Reason
- 06. Pillars Of Err
- 07. Solitary Confinement
- 08. Architects Of Modern Atheism
- 09. The Burning