It’s time for a debut album, my Metal grasshoppers! When I was reading OBRIJ’s promo, I was led to believe that Joseph would totally throw me out of my comfort zone, since it was supposed to have a ton of Hardcore influences. Yet, it was still a Death Metal album, and that always hits home for me. Plus, this work explores the atrocities of Comrade Stalin. There’s no way that horror isn’t Metal enough for us, but as a new band, I still wondered if these guys were capable of pulling anything interesting off. Stay with this cat and find out.
Despite all the experimental talk, you don’t fool me, Joseph! This is Swedish/Dutch Death Metal—Entombed and Asphyx style. I get that the guitar distortion and the songwriting move away by an inch from that style, but if you’d told me these guys are from Huddinge, I would’ve said, “Yeah, they sound local to me.” But no! The agony and despair compressed in these tracks overtake any sense of fury and rebellion. Joseph is a bleak and hostile depiction of one of the darkest moments in human history, and yet it doesn’t get massively complicated for the listener to understand what’s going on.
Even if some ideas here are retro, the vocals are something else. They express so much pain! It’s like someone is watching their village razed to the ground by tanks, and there’s nothing they can do but watch as everything they know gets crushed into oblivion. Oh wow, that was dark! Sorry, but Joseph puts you in that somber mood, even if I don’t think the individual elements here are something we haven’t explored before. Together, they do feel like their own interpretation of horrendous events.
As I said before, Joseph borrows a lot from the Swedish school, and though I find it fresh how it uses this for its narrative, I can’t avoid the fact that if I didn’t put in the extra effort of caring about the history behind it, I wouldn’t be able to tell it apart from other old-school Death Metal albums. And in this world where one of those comes out every week, standing out becomes difficult. I don’t know when this became the meta of Death Metal, but I believe it’s starting to limit many bands. I know OBRIJ has the potential to experiment outside this formula and give us something even more crushing.
Still, it’s an interesting voyage to heinous times that will add a harrowing dimension to a sound you usually just associate with bar fights and mosh pits. That’s cool, right? What I think is even cooler is seeing tracks named after one of my all-time favorite novels! That doesn’t happen every day, and it makes a band look cultured, which in our rancid and smelly niche always hits like a breath of fresh air.
Label: Self-released?
Release date: February 27, 2025
Website: https://obrij.bandcamp.com/
Country: Ukraine
Score: Spending three days without water, or 3.5/5.0
Metal Eclipse Reviews 