Liste der Bands Death Metal Magenta Harvest A Familiar Room

It took some six years for Magenta Harvest to finally release their first demo. Quite a long time if you ask me. If you read their bio, you’ll see that most of the time spent in between foundation and release was spent on securing a stable line-up primarily made of ...And Oceans members. Still, it's an awfully long time to release anything so now that it’s out, one probably has the right to be curious about the end results. Six years to deliver some mind-blowing epic Death Metal or rather six years wasted down the drain?

Let’s see. Hailing from Finland where Death Metal and Black Metal bands sprout like marijuana in a Mexican greenhouse, Magenta Harvest deliver four rapid blows that will aim at your head like four uppercuts. All the tracks, from Sermon to the eponymous A Familiar Room display Brutal yet modern influences with a take on catchiness that betray their Finnish origins or the fact that Finntroll’s Mathias Lillmans is their frontman. Yet, this Death Metal sounds a lot more Swedish than Finnish and you'll soon find parts reminiscent of older glories Dismember or more recent “groovy” act Vicious Art.

Now there’s strictly nothing wrong with A Familiar Room. But it does indeed sound so familiar that it may rather be mistaken as generic instead. Not an ounce of originality here and unfortunately even though the Finns were blessed with great production and are also apt at writing ok songs, it always feels as if you listened to these songs a million times already. Newer Death Metal fans may eventually rave about it and declare they've found the newest gem in Death Metal to be worshipped but older seasoned fans will find themselves wanting for some more. Sure you get the blasted parts, there’s the occasional keys a la Morbid Angel, you also have breaks and down-tempos, and yes you do have everything that make up a good Death Metal record but still the one, and most important, thing is missing. Call it feeling or inspiration, or whatever you wish it to be, but it's not impressive one bit and in the end this CD might well turn out to be some dust magnet in your discotheque.

Let’s only hope that Magenta Harvest will not wait another six years to deliver something this common and that they’d come up with something even a little more inspired than this “debut”. Or they’d be better off calling it quits.