Mindscar
Kill the King

Uncle Owl is back, and he wants to do it in grand style!

The record I'm about to review here is by far the most exciting, piercing, powerful, and devastating thing I've had the pleasure of listening to this year! Mindscar, an American band active since '98 and creator of a self-titled EP and a couple of demos, initially hid a rather stereotypical black metal sound that was overall functional... a pity that as time went by, the band completely overturned their sound, turning it into an incredible weapon of mass destruction based on Techno-Death, Black with slight Belphagorian hints and even a slight Metalcore touch, and this year Mindscar took this pastiche and pulled out the album of the year (at least for me): "Kill the King", a damn death smoothie with an exquisite flavor! This record is a mix of immense violence and epicness, where you will really hear everything: acoustic guitar arpeggios in the intro and outro, groove double-pedal hammering that makes your intestines implode, blast beats at full throttle that shake buildings, sporadic clean choruses that create atmosphere, epic and at the same time incredibly heavy riffs (think Sarpanitum, but a bit less melodic), extremely flashy but imaginative phrasing and scales, fun and never random, a perfectly fitting scream vocal style of Black/Metalcore, and so on, in 11 tracks of which none are out of place, and for almost 40 minutes of headbanging complete with pogo against the house walls. Try listening to tracks like the opener "Asmodeus", the title track "Kill the King", the mighty "Ashes Made of Heaven", the beastly "Forever Consumes You" or, even better, the fantastic final cover of "Mr. Self Destruct" by Nine Inch Nails! The whole package is topped off with a simply emblematic cover: a king with blood-stained hands, surrounded by a thousand skeletons, with swords and an hourglass… a damn Must Have!