Review: Serpentshrine “Besetting the Altar”

Serpentshrine “Besetting the Altar”

SERPENTSHRINE is a young band (founded in 2015) from Virginia Beach. It’s not so big city, even if it’s the most populous one in state of Virginia – officially Commonwealth of Virginia where live less than 460.000 people. But place is very important for history of the States. We can even say that it had its beginning just right here. Of course, the city has very well developed tourist infrastructure, but not only. There’re two universities, three military bases, international headquarters and so on. Also on the field of culture Virginia Beach isn’t any desert and even contrary.

By the way, let’s back to these de facto two (drummer BS is only a studio member) residents of mentioned above city. “Besetting the Altar” is of course their debut full-length and the first release ever, anyway. Stuff contains nine songs. Guys call their music Black/Death Metal and in general I can agree with this term, but… Well, there’re always some “but”. In this case it’s rather a compliment for musicians and their music imagination. Anyway, the fact is that I’d surely upside down words.

Here’s much more elements of death than black. To be honest I can find them really hardly in music of Virginians. Generally it’s technical as well. Riffs aren’t maybe complicated, but they change quite often instead. Mostly Connor plays heavy ones, but it happens also sometimes (and it’s not only about beginnings of some songs) that he serves us calmer ones, too. Especially after them I can hear that he has bread music horizons. The same I can say about Bryan’s bass playing which’s often very well hearable. His vocal is something what I’d call melodic growling, but we also can hear his “real” voice in few moments. Drumming is of course adjusted to rest of the music – various.

In general everything is in middle or even middle-slow tempo. I didn’t noticed some bigger speed-ups here. But somehow it doesn’t matter and disturbs the fact that we’ll connote this with metal. Especially as on a debut, it’s very good stuff! There’re things to improve, but it’s enough to listen to this music just to know that guys think during process of creating music.

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