### Fester: A celebration of death

#### 17/05/12 || Sokaris

All signs pointed to this album being something right up my alley despite the fact that I wasn’t familiar with Norway’s extreme metallers Fester before my initial spin of the “A celebration of death”. Considering the band’s name and title for this release, I expected the kind of dark, morbid death that used to thrive back in the band’s heyday, the early 90s. The album also greets us with excellent cover that has to come from godlike artist Eliran Kantor whose work you may have seen on Sigh’s “In somniphobia” earlier this year. Unfortunately this album left me pretty cold, and not in a grim black metally kind of way either. I just found that the whole album came off as lifeless and honestly extremely boring. That combined with probably the worst snare sound I’ve ever heard didn’t do much to bring me into the songs. Stylistically the band play a sort of atmospheric black/death, but lacking of aggression, passion or emotion. Imagine merging Dark Tranquillity and Necrophobic… and then stripping both bands of everything that makes either one interesting. It’s certainly not the worst thing I’ve heard in 2012 but it was the hardest to stay awake through.

3.5/10: Time to take a Fester siesta.