Soft and Stronger

This is an excellent album considering this is a debut album, the musicians don't just play music influenced by other artists almost copying styles (a thing that many bands do in their debut albums), these guys created their own style from the beginning and that includes varying in genres (a feature that develops in the next albums). While it's true that this album consists of mainly extreme metal genres (grindcore, black metal, death metal), you can also hear folk metal. Furthermore, they manage to make this kind of music sound catchy and that's what makes the album unique and special. Not many bands can make catchy music playing extreme metal genres.

This is a very special album, if you like extreme metal like grindcore, death, and black, in a melodic way. And as I stated before, you can hear also some folk influences, which makes this album even greater. If you already listened to one of their albums you should know that you can't just put this band into a genre. The growling and screaming (which are perfectly sung given that they appear in several tones) mix with the heavy riffs, the awesome drum beats performed by Skelleton (the former drummer) and those incredible bass lines (mainly 5-string bass). Dr. Pest (the keyboard player) takes over the melodic and folk parts (mainly flute and piano), along with the riffs perfmormed by Fuchs. The music is extremely fast (not all the time though), except for the keyboard that maintains that folk and dark vibe. The vocals fix perfectly to the music and vice versa, sometimes when a song's slow part is being played, the growls get deeper and lower, but when they play faster these get louder. All this mixes perfectly and creates a very unique sound. Basically it's a mixture between death, black and folk metal and grindcore.

When it comes to the lyrics I must say that they are pretty good in general terms, they sing about death, anger and society problems and even the end of the world. The problem here is, that most of the parts of the lyrics on every song are not really sung, the lyrics appear on the booklet and you can find them on Internet but when you listen to the songs the singing is mainly screaming and growling but the lyrics are not recited except for some sentences and few clean vocals. Maybe that's not a big problem for some grindcore or death metal fans, but in my opinion when a singer don't really pronounce or say what appear on the lyrics and that's a mistake for me, the only song in which the lyrics are completely sung is "Metal Will Never Die", one of the bests on this album.

Finally I would like to say that this is my least-favorite Reiter album (along with the new one "Tief. Tiefer" but for completely different reasons), just for you to know how great this band is. The reason why I give this album a 90 is because even if this my least favorite album from this band, the other albums are amazing, and this one is not as great as those, but still it is a very good album, not so far from perfect in my opinion. I recommend you all to listen to the subsequent albums, so you can realize all that this band has to offer.

"Must hear songs": "Iron Fist", "Instinct", "V.A.D.E.R", "Metal Will Never Die", "Slaves of Hate".

D.A.R. are a very special band. Anyone who doesn't realize that is clearly eligible for the special Olympics.

Anyway, on this older material, they somehow manage to blend spacey black metal and melodious death metal with some folk essence in the melodies and the pacing of the song. Really this is a band that refuses to fall into a genre. They are the far less mainstream, German counterpart of System of a Down. If the name System of a Down turns you off, let me say, the basis of their sound is in black metal on this album, and far less radio-friendly than that band. Not to mention this band is much more talented and way, way more metal.

The influences here range from raw hardcore punk and Napalm Death to early Amorphis albums, from forest-trotting flutes, to Dismember to Windir sounding melodic black metal.

There is a lot of blasting, and intense screaming ... which seems to somehow escape being easily defined.

The rawness of the production is great, and really reflects the bands attitude towards impressing people with false pretenses. An 80's type of production, but the guitars a just a little too quiet sometimes.

The vocals range from the high demented troll sounding vocals, to lower thrashy vocals, to lower-still death growls, to Billy Idol? sounding singing.

They don't develope their own signature sound till later, but this album is a must for anyone who just likes metal, and likes to defy genres (or anyone who likes to listen to bands that defy genres).