Review: Stromptha / Oldmoon

Stromptha / Oldmoon
South Horde Productions

Some time ago I reviewed other splits where Colombian project OLDMOON participated. Anyway, it was few months ago and it seems that David can’t stay calm longer. So he found another project to make a split together. STROMPTHA is a guy who hides under just one letter – J. He plays everything and sings, but unfortunately I have no idea when he decided to do that. The only thing I know is that he released digitally so called EP (who knows me, knows why I wrote “so called”) in 2015. Well, I know one more thing to be honest. I mean, this guy was born and lived (also beginnings of the project were there) in one of the northernmost towns in the world where live something like 660 people – Qaanaaq in northeast Greenland. Later he moved to France then.

But let’s talk about music finally! This digitally released split contains two songs of each band. As the first presents us what he created mentioned above guy. Since I didn’t hear “Necronirisme” I can’t tell you if this one song (first one is intro) is similar or not to these one from debut release of J. Anyway, this is in even slow tempo and with clean vocal. Well, there’s some element of energy here. It reminds me a little earlier creativity of ANATHEMA. It isn’t any copy of course and I can hear another inspiration – not only Metal ones, by the way. Structure of the music isn’t complicated; you’ll don’t find any technical displays and stuff like that here. This is good one to calm down, take some rest, relax, dream.

David (because this was, is and probably will be the only one who creates OLDMOON) serve us two new songs. Well, musically this is rather continuation of earlier creativity. I mean, there’s nothing revolutionary here. But in my opinion this is a plus! This is still Doom with strong elements of Death Metal. Structure of compositions isn’t complicated, but surely more developed than in case of our friend from Greenland. However, riffs are surely more diversified here and heavier as well. Drumming is more dynamic, vocal is stricter Metal one – I mean, growling.

Well, just check it out and decide if it’s worth these seven bucks – there’s such option on Bandcamp. In my opinion it can be. Well, if it’d be normal EP or at least CD (by the way, David told me that there’ll maybe be another 20 physical copies in the future) then I’d have no doubts.