Alienation

The trio from France called Strynn, a little more than a year after the interesting album Decadence, they return with their second full length album, which is called Alienation. This album was released in December of 2014 and it contains eleven compositions with overall duration which exceeds one hour. Those of you who have listened to their previous album, you know what you should expect from this one too. So in this one, the band presents harsh French Black Metal with a few references to the Scandinavian sound.

Unfortunately already by the first few notes the listener can understand that this album will not be as interesting as the previous one. The riffs are harsh, melancholic up to depressive and their speed mainly is medium. The first band that comes to the mind of the listener while listening to the album is Mutiilation. Maybe in here it is more obvious than in any of their previous releases, how much the band is influenced by the mentioned above band. The similarity to such extent sometimes becomes annoying. The other two problems that I found into the album and annoyed me a lot are, on one hand that there are a lot of uninspired and boring riffs that you will come across into various parts into the album, on the other hand the structure of the tracks is rough. The tracks have a quite long duration and they follow a stable, monotonous and repetitive structure. All this makes the listener experience a boring and quite tedious hour during listening to this album. Unfortunately the very few good ideas which exist are lost.

Concerning the instruments, the situation is somewhat better as there are no mistakes and their performance is in a satisfying level. The guitars have a harsh sound and they are trying to create the atmosphere and feelings to the listener, but not every time with success. The bass is not audible at all. The drums give stability and depth to the compositions but they can’t manage to do anything that will catch the listener’s attention. Finally, the vocals are harsh Black Metal vocals which remind a lot of Meyhna’ch, but they are way more monotonous. The production is bass and quite clean. The mixture is not so good, because the guitars are placed in the middle and they are pressed by the drums and by the vocals which sometimes strangle them and you have to pay much attention to the music in order to manage to listen to them. The lyrics are written in English but they are not contained in the cd.

Alienation have been a really disappointing release for me. Unfortunately the band had shown into its previous album that it can offer to the listener a lot of things, here it achieved to destroy whatever had built until now. This is an album that very few will listen to and it will be forgotten fast. I suggest you to avoid it.