Review: DOWNCAST TWILIGHT “Under The Wings Of The Aquila”

DOWNCAST TWILIGHT “Under The Wings Of The Aquila”
Stygian Crypt productions

And here we have to do with another young band or maybe better to say: project. It was founded in December 2015 by mixing and mastering engineer O’Grego, with the help of the accomplished author, Marios Koutsoukos. Of course there’re other musician in DOWNCAST TWILIGHT, some guests also participated in recording debut album of West Midlands’ based act. For these of you who don’t know (yet) West Midlands is one of ten England’s regions which’s capital is Birmingham. Other huge cities are Coventry, Wolverhampton and Stoke-on-Trent over there. Anyway, in rather modest bio I found information which says that every CD makes reference to historic era or / and civilization.

So now everyone knows without reading the lyrix that we have with concept album to do here. What takes music it’s melodic surely, but it’s not as easy as anything to describe this by some one term. The fact is that I found something about Viking/Folk, Death and Black Metal on their profile on blue f. I can hear hardly find at least one element which I could connote with Folk – in my opinion fact that Shannon (Lee Stott-Rigsby) plays from time to time, rather subtle, violin is not enough to use mentioned above term. Other thing is that as old orthodox I’m not, to put it mildly, lover of using words like “folk” in context of Metal. But this is only what I think and I can always be wrong in this point. By the way, I hear here some huge touch of Melodic Death Metal. There’s right dose of brutality here, but I have to say directly that this is brutality in vein of for example Greek NIGHTFALL from first release especially. Tempo is rather slow, but it absolutely doesn’t approximate to roadroller.Riffs are various and heavy as well. Riffs say us that both Jan and OGrego are defiantly strongly inspired by Death Metal. They play mostly heavy, powerful and various ones. It’s less about “The Red Queen” which has other character – it’s calmer and female vocal of Angela-Kelly Antoniou (Hildr Valkyrie). Anyhow, we have here quite many, even if not so very well-hearable, influences of other genres of music.

The main vocalist here is Vitold Buznaev from Nabierezhne Chelny in Tatarstan (Russia). His growling is more in the vein of Melodic Death Metal, I think. There’s brutality in that, but in the same time it’s calm, if we can use this word with reference to growling. Hope so you know what I meant using just this word here! Rhythm section is also playing in stricte Metal way. Of course there’re slower fragments, but in general you can easily hear that it was programming by Metalhead (I didn’t find any information about drummer anywhere, so the only logic conclusion is that we have to do with drum-machine here) with music imagination. Mostly it’s in middle tempo, but there’re some faster parts and of course some passages. What’s minus in my opinion is minimal lack of cymbals’ option. Bass during the session played Jan Banas instead of regular bassist Chris Zindros (except bass solo in “The Red Queen”).

And why I write that in my opinion it’s better to use word ‘project’ when it’s about DOWNCAST TWILIGHT?!? Well, answer is as easy as pie: coz some members live in other countries: Russia, USA, Greece, Poland. And my orthodox meaning of word ‘band’ means rehearsals and so on. Anyways, regardless of which word should be used when we’re talking about DOWNCAST TWILIGHT We have to do with good album here. I’m waiting for next one, anyway. You’ll find their profile on blue f and there you should write to get know everything.