Author Archives: Ishaan Kumar
Mumbais Stark Denial are a part of the sparsely scattered black metal roster from India. Having formed in 2009, the band completed their debut EP titled War this year and finally released it. The EP lists 5 songs but effectively contains 3 original Stark Denial compositions, the ones in the midsection. The opener titled ‘The Beginning’ is an intro sound FX trackof marching feet, guns and explosions. No doubt its purpose was to drive the name of the EP into the listeners head but frankly, adding some music would have been a better use of the audio mix timeline. Gates of War, the first proper song on the album immediately has the listeners attention with its marching drum…
A very prominent feature of the old school metal ethos is that the third album in a band’s career has very often become its landmark album. Whether it is Master of Puppets or The Number of the Beast or even Reign in Blood, third albums have reached legendary statuses in countless cases. But would equating such legendary success to a similar possibility in the case of Bangalore’s Kryptos be too much of a long shot? Read on to decide for yourself. For the uninitiated, Kryptos essentially play a very unique brand of melodic death metal, tightly encased in a steely packaging of old-school heavy metal, thrash metal and doom metal sentiments. Their latest album The…
The North-east is the ‘elephant in the room’ for the current Indian metal scene. Everyone knows the level of metal that comes from there, but no one wants to talk about it. Whether it is the fact that the bands themselves don’t blow much of a trumpet about their own music or whether fans feel more comfortable with the already well-established cities like Bangalore or Mumbai, the ‘elephant in the room’ needs to trumpet louder. Dark Carnage, a melodic death metal/metalcore outfit from Guwahati, seems to be ready to take up exactly that very mantle. While the idea of an intro song has become a bit clichéd in metal now, the one here is not one…
