Review: SLICE OF SORROW “Execution”

SLICE OF SORROW “Execution”
Metal Carnival Records

There’re some bands who say that they play Melodic Death and/or Black Metal and are sweeter than candy. That’s why I’m always very skeptic when I hear/read this term and I approach stuff with trepidation. Fortunately this time my doubts or even fears were unnecessary. I mean, there is a lot of melody in what SLICE OF SORROW proposes us, but there’s also enough element of power or even brutality and I can feel in entire moment that this is melodic, but still extreme Metal what I listen to.

The band hasn’t a lot experience because it was found in 2015 as a side project of guitarist and vocalist of INSTORM Roman Nemtsev. He just wrote too heavy and too dark stuff with lyrics which didn’t match INSTORM’s style. And since he thought that created songs should be heard he decided to record it under the other name. ‘Execution’ is a debut full-length and second release ever in history of this band – first one was a three tracks long demo ‘Play for Pain’, even if in those time SLICE OF SORROW was only a project. Anyway, guys describe their creativity as Atmospheric Death Metal and I even can agree with that. I mean, there’s surely some dark atmosphere here, even if ‘atmosphere’ mostly means here something else than a lot of you probably expect from this word.

As I said there’s a lot of melody here, but created by guitars first of all – keyboard (often stylized on organs, sometimes clavecin) is coming occasionally and mostly plays in background. It’s even about beginning of “Kingdom of Suffering”. Riffs are also as broken as it should be in such creativity, somehow even these more melodic ones are often so. There’re of course some stricte melodic riffs and so on. In general music is in middle tempos with some speed-ups, too. They take place quite rarely, but especially in them we’re able to hear Death Metal character of what Russians present us. I’d compare this to classic for this sub-genre of music bands.

You should know what bands I mean. Anyhow, Roman use growling all the time what gives to music mentioned above Death Metal character for sure. He works on this field in several kinds. I mean, growling isn’t totally the same whole the stuff. This is also exactly how it should be in such kind of Death Metal. To sum up, guys (except Roman in the band are: Nikolay – guitars, Alexandr – bass and Maxim -drums) do good job and serve us music with consideration on this album. So if you like melody in Death Metal then this is for you.