Review: Empyrean Plague “Imprint Evidence Destiny”

Empyrean Plague “Imprint Evidence Destiny”

This band comes from North Bay in Ontario, Canada. It’s not so big town where live something like 55.000 people. History isn’t long (more or less 125 years) and it’s strongly connected with railway. Today, of course, economy looks in different way – huge percentage of people work in education, also on Nipissing University. Well, we can actually risk a thesis that there’s nothing super interesting except beautiful nature around the city.

But hey!!!!! There’s one more interesting thing there for sure in North Bay!!! It’s interesting at least for us – Metalheads. This thing calls EMPYREAN PLAGUE and was created in 2002. In this thing in which we’re interested and which name I mentioned above participate four guys. They released a split with DERTAH and three albums – third one from 2011 is now re-released. As I can see after reading their biography they’re very important band for Black Metal scene in their region of Ontario.

So “Imprint Evidence Destiny” contains six quite long songs – the shortest and last one on album (“A New Life Has Begun”) is about 5.24. Music which’s serving by Canadians is surely Black Metal. But it’s nothing what can be adored by fans of so called Norwegian Black Metal! Songs have expanded structure. I can after few first (or even first one) bars recognize which song is just beginning. Riffs remind me a little Greek style of playing Black Metal. They’re not very complicated ones, they don’t change whole the time. But they create very nice, but raw enough in the same time melody and right climate. Drums’ work is also variable, even if I don’t notice some galaxy passages and other technical displays. But Treacherry use cymbals from time to time what surely makes songs even more interesting. And what we can say about vocal?!? Well, both guitarists (Mike Burge and Kyle Taylor) take care about it. The truth is that main vocalist is Mike, but we can also hear Kyle sometimes. Anyway, it reminds me a little for example Sakis Tolis’ way of singing. Sometimes it’s more Norwegian or even desperate, sometimes we hear few verses of clean sing…

Music in general is in middle tempos and there aren’t some extreme speed-ups or slow-downs. It’s whole the time in more or less the same tempo. Of course it doesn’t mean that guys never speed-up at least a little. They do it from time to time – the fact is that rather rarely and on quite short time, but… OH… I almost forget to mention Kye Bell’s bass play. And it’s also worth of attention. As I hear it’s technical and add music some extra value.

So if you like rather Melodic Black Metal than this album (and as I suppose others, too) is just for you! I like this and even if I didn’t become true-blue fan who’s falling in love with every note of the band I’ll surely back to “Imprint…” from time to time.

empyreanplague@gmail.com