Gronde

Gronde is a new band (2010) from the big French scene and they present us their first demo consisting of 14 (!!!) tracks. As you can understand the material is enough in order to create a clear image for the band, their music and their abilities. Let’s begin with the awesome cover. Black and white, dark, reminds of the French scene (personally it reminded me of Deathspell Omega) and shows the band’s professionalism.

So in “Gronde” the band plays a straightforward old school Heavy – Black/Death, without cosmetics, barbaric and straight in the face of the listener. The tracks are mainly rhythmic mid – tempo with sometimes slow, sometimes fast passages. The demo begins with a very good track and fortunately it continues like that. The mixture of Black, Death and many Heavy elements creates a very good result, very violent and very intensive. The guitars deliver the riffs very well and their sound is clean as much as it should be and where needed. In bass and drums parts of the album there has been done a very good job. The vocals are rotten Death Metal very authentic, barbaric, gives something more to the tracks. The production is bassy, a little dirty but it has been worked so that the listener can hear the instruments clearly and that the tracks don’t lose that primitively violent feeling that they have. The lyrics deal with evil, dark and warlike themes.

Generally this album is very good, not that it doesn’t have its weaknesses (personally I didn’t like so much the – few – hyperspeed passages and maybe 2-3 tracks could be left out of the album), but they don’t affect the total quality of the result. The tracks I distinguished are: All Hail God, Under the Acid Shower, Chaotic Stream and Nous les Lavres. This is a demo release that really worth your money.