Review: Rawrorr “Solipsism”

Rawrorr Solipsism

Ukraine: land of vast steppes, beautiful women and magnificent black metal. While these features of the country are well known, many others remain in the shadows. But I’m talking specifically about death metal bands. Very few names sound familiar (maybe Fleshgore, Hell:on and the mighty Tessaract), and even new projects appear in very small amounts. But the fact is that there is very good material out there that worth checking out.

Rawrorr is a good example of this. Based in Odesa, this 2 guys unleashed their first full-length under the name of Solipsism. This is pure death metal. Almost nothing melodic will be found here, also no technicalities.

Swedish-styled guitars, excellently well executed monstrous growling and simple but correct drumming, play the main role throughout these 30 minutes of mid tempo death metal filled with doomy and creepy atmospheres.

Solipsism has everything required to be a very enjoyable album, especially for old school fans. Slow doom brutality ala Asphyx,  dark and grim atmospheres influenced by Autopsy‘s creations, and even furious blast-beats and a highly audible bass that reminds us of Cannibal Corpse by creating very aggressive moments.

Songs are quite similar to each other, but they have very interesting tempo changes that help to evade boringness, even though in some ocassions everything tends to be monotonous.

As negative points: songwriting could be better. There are no memorable riffs or songs, just decent/good ones. The same goes for the production, which is correct, but sounds weak.

All in all, Solipsism is a great release that won’t add anything new to the genre, but at least death metal fans will put their eyes on the Ukrainian scene if they’re looking for a good dose of musical demise.

There is no physical version of this album yet, it’s only available in digital format. Let’s hope we can have this on CD quite soon, and also to hear more stuff from this killer duo.