ESQARIAL „Burned Ground Strategy”

Music: Technical/Progressive Death Metal
Website: http://www.esqarial.com
Country: Poland

Cool songs: Mors Tua Vita Mea, Burned Ground Strategy, Operation Totentanz, Cyanide Candies

Four long years, four fucking years we had to wait for another album of the Polish death metal veterans from ESQARIAL! As time goes by, it flied quite slowly, and I was going mad, because I could please myself with their last album, titled Klassika where they mixed powerful metal with classical content, an album full of passion and harmony. And now they serve us Burned Ground Strategy, something completely different.

Why is it so different? Well, from the very beginning the music simply kicks ass and leaves a damn huge bruise on it. Yes, that is right. Whereas Klassika was a turn in the direction of power/heavy metal, it was very melodic and harmonic, the newest child of ESQARIAL is brutal and uncontrollable. Just to start with fantastic machine gun drums which create the mood of the whole album. Damn, it is a real killer. First of all the compositions are so complete, they form a concept album full of savage energy and vicious power. Everything is so mean and poisonous, it infects your soul, curves the spine and crushes your bones that you are hammered to the ground forever. The heavy, fleshy and truly aggressive riffs do not leave any doubts with whom are we dancing. It is a true dance macabre, the perfect death melt which is eating us bit by bit, piece by piece, chewing and spitting with the speed of a bullet shot out of the gun. Not to mention the fantastic and spellbinding solos which are like dynamite. As mentioned, Klassika was a completely different album, but Burned Ground Strategy has got a few elements in common with its older brother. Those are speed and melodic elements, audible mainly in the solos. But the rest is completely new and different. There are a few grinding elements in Question of Honour, which indicate Mareks performance in AMORPHOUS, his second musical project, mainly of death/grind metal. The guitars are more fleshy, they simply growl and smash the brains. The album is also reinforced by a lot of blasts which make it sound even more dynamic and deadly.

Coming back to Marek, his vocal is a kind of Polish phenomenon. From the beginning of times it was written by God, that Poles will not possess the ability to sing with a deep-throat growl. But that man is fucking doing it, and he is doing it so damn well that every time he opens his mouth goose bumps attack my body! Damn you Marek, for allowing us to wait so long for your astonishing vox!

The compositions are pretty complex, as it should be in death metal, they are of progressive tune, everything chops and changes and everyone is satisfied. There is no place for repetition, the motifs are shot at a deadly speed, they fly in different directions and do not come back. They just leave huge wounds in the body… so after listening to one track you are holed like a Swiss cheese. And there is no time to recover as in a moment another compositions smites you with its aggressive and vicious force. The melodic sections are mainly the refrains (great Cyanide Candies) or solos and that is enough, we do not want that pure aggression to be spoiled by too much melody. The proportions are added properly and everything works perfectly. Also the sound effects (a few, also not to spoil the brutal pleasure) are added properly, they create an interesting and quite mysterious atmosphere. Thanks to them the whole is quite grim.

To sum it up the new proposition from ESQARIALs forgery is very interesting. It is damn heavy, pretty fleshy, really aggressive, totally blows away, contains melodic elements and last but not least, it is brutal. It creates a new-old direction for the band, as it is some sort of back to the roots, to aggressive death metal with melodic elements. What more can one want? It will not be a big rival for this years UNLEASHED premiere, although it is still a fucking piece of damn good death metal! It was worth waiting for the album. And I will wait more for the next, as it seems that everything is going in an upgrading direction. Haste makes waste and in this example it is shown that the time spent on writing and preparing the material not even a second was wasted.

note: 9.5/10

Tracklist

1. Alarm!
2. Mors Tua Vita Mea
3. Experiment Fear
4. Devastated Harmony
5. Children's Crusade
6. They're Coming…
7. Burned Ground Strategy
8. Operation Totentanz
9. Question of Honour
10. The Colour of Your God
11. Cyanide Candies

Total playing time 41:19

Line-up

Marek Pająk – guitars, vocals
Bartek Nowak – guitars, vocals
P. Ludendorf – bass
Bandaý – drums