Front - Iron Overkill (2016)

Formed from members of Finnish black metal group Sacrilegious Impalement, these black/death thrashers have unveiled a debut album that sounds about as raw and furious as you might expect. The vocals are very high in the mix, but they're quite fearsome and match the nastiness of the performance, which is going to sit right at home in the collections of classic heads. It's a bit hard to hear some of Von Bastard's leads and he doesn't really play an awful lot of solos (see “Wargods Unbound” for a great one though) but despite that, we still get a pretty pungent package with Revenant's drum abrasion and choral duetting (if you want to call it that) with frontman Kaosbringer. Revenant has an extremely throaty roar, which melds in with Kaosbringer's scowl as something simply unholy. Add in the drum pummeling and you'll got a pure exercise in destruction. Von Bastard fills the disc with eerie tremolo riffing in an attempt to bring about a rather horrifying atmosphere that I certainly found effective. Though it's still a rather low quality performance, it's definitely a good one. I'm sure that these guys are going to sound better on a live front, so if you get a chance to see them, you'll get a much better performance than what this disc offers. It's also taken from my own personal observations and experiences, that music is much better performed live. If there's anything I can really complain about here, it's that the disc feels very claustrophobic and these gentlemen seem like they've been cramped into a tiny box by which the sound reverberates off the walls. The sounds of war definitely help the experience here, but there's no doubting that you're getting a truly bare bones production with this one. If you've simply got to have it as raw and kvlt as can possibly be, then you'll certainly find something here. It's pretty decent I'll say, and I think these guys will go pretty far with this material. That being said, they're nearly in five other bands at least and aren't going to quit music anytime soon. I see Front as another project, and it's more or less in the same vein as their previous metal work. Go check it out.

(8 Tracks, 36:00)

7/10