Mass Murder Genesis

Vokodlok is most likely one of the best black metal bands from Eastern Europe (for obvious reasons, I'll exclude Poland...). They are as good as May Result, The Stone, Negură Bunget, Nokturnal Mortum or Lucifugum, but they are less known then the afromentioned bands.
Mass Murder Genesis is their first full lenght album, and the debut of their record label, Beauty of Pain Records, and it's a total succes.
Production is clean, and virtually everything can be heard, besides the cymbals, which are drowned in the production. Vocals and guitars dominate the production.
Vokodlok give us on this album 10 great traditional raw black metal tracks, in the vein of Darkthrone and Immortal, while still being original.
The vocalist is the best thing from the band, his screaming is incredible, totally great. Very fast, black metall-ish riffing, great drumwork (the only problem is the one which I presented earlier at the production, the cymbals get drowned...).
Most tracks have English lyrics, besides the second track, Blestem, which is in Romanian.

Vokodlok - definitely a band not many people have heard of yet. What the average black metal fan will appreciate is that there's certainly no sell-out here, but will this be sufficient to enter the unholy halls of Black Metal Valhalla? We'll see…

The album starts with "Murder Introduction", a below-midtempo song like old Samael or "True Carnage"-era Six Feet Under could have done it (in terms of speed only, of course), although the vocals are more reminiscent of Immortal, rather speaking with a harsh voice than actually singing. The main riff is quite catchy, and I like this slow style anyway.

Track 2, "Blestem", the only song not in English (probably Vokodlok's native tongue Romanian), brings about a nice change in pace. Not only is there constant torturing of the double bass machine, but the other drums are being hit hard and fast as well, and Strigoi, the vocalist, is screaming instead of just speaking. The song features a second, very good riff in its second half and there is some use of stereo effects, which I can imagine could work out very well when listening with a headphone.

Unfortunately, however, once the song is over you have basically heard all the album has to offer. The other tracks are not bad, but fundamentally all sound the same. They're all fast, somewhat melodic and based on one or two riffs, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but the riffs are just far too similar. Strigoi is still screaming, the drums are playing hard and fast, the bass is audible, but never in the foreground. No keyboards or electronic stuff are used throughout the album. The production is very clean, and there's only little "underground" feeling to the album, nor does it create any kind of special atmosphere - something that would be very important for a black metal release. Most of the songs are between 3 and 4 minutes, but the lyrics and musical ideas in general end around the 2-minute mark, so although the album's total playing time is only 37.xx, it becomes pretty boring halfway into it.

Part 6, an acoustic guitar piece with a duration of just two minutes, is a nice idea, but it can't save the album from mediocrity, either. Granted, the album is raw and hard and especially the first two songs had easily convinced me, but it soon became apparent that there's a serious lack of variation and atmosphere. For those readers who care about the lyrics, just look at the tracklist: Nothing to complain about, but all in all the same problem as the music, namely "uninspired".