Review: STASS “The Darkside”

STASS “The Darkside”
Mighty Music / Target Group

Now in virtual reality everything’s possible and as easy as anything (of course if someone only has will of doing). I think this is probably the main reason why we have with so many international bands to do. Well, such creatures of course existed in 90’s and, I guess, even earlier. But it happened rarely and was rather eccentricity coz of several technical problems, costs of postage and so on.

In this part of Europe which creates EU that’s also easier for such international ensembles even to play gigs often. STASS have members from Sweden and Germany. Well, as I know only Felix lives in this second country (precisely in Mannheim). The best past of them play in other bands, too. The only exception is drummer Erik who can be concentrated only on STASS. Anyhow, discography isn’t huge as on five years of existence. Actually that’s just reviewing album is the only release of the band what can suggest that the band was more concept, idea which finally materialized this year.

By the way, we have on ‘The Darkside’ with ten songs to do. Description I found is: Death Metal. And I definitely deal with it. This is not very brutal, fast and so on, but hey! Death Metal has many faces. Felix and Swedes show us this “calmer”, more melodic one. But you’ll find quite many technical displays here as well. Music is mostly in middle tempo and guys play with imagination. Riffs don’t change too often (what’s about harmony and makes music nice to listen to), but Kjetil and Rogga present really wide range of them. I mean, there’re several influences and some of them remind other sub-genres of Metal. Anyway, mentioned above guitarists and bassist Johan play together in another international band ECHELON.

I can say the same about Felix’ singing. There’s of course a growling, but also clean singing – both are in few variants what depends on character of the music, common climate in this or another moment. Erik beats energetically and variable as well. We have some speed-ups, passages, changes of tempo. I can easily hear on ‘The Darkside’ old good Swedish school of Death Metal! As I said there’re several influences, but it only makes music more interesting.

That’s why I recommend this album to Death Metal fans, first of all. In my opinion STASS is representative of classic point of view on this genre – with some influences. Some songs haven’t stricte Death Metal character or even structure, but… Frankly, I have quite strong connotations from time to time with some Swedish band who was formed under the name TREBLINKA, but before recording debut album changed both the name and musical style. And I hope so it’ll not take another five years to the band to serve us their second work!