Immortal Souls - "Wintermetal"

Immortal Souls - Wintermetal
2015, Rottweiler

1. First Snow of Winter
2. Calm Before the Snowstorm
3. Dawn of Northern Coldness
4. The Trail in the Snow
5. Inverno
6. Snowstorm
7. Cold and Barren Land
8. Northern Star
9. The Grave of a Poet
10. Solitude
11. Wintermetal

I've never really liked melodic death metal. Of course, I've never really listened to a lot of it but what I had heard never really grabbed me. Except for Immortal Souls, that is. Immortal Souls has been around for a good long while but this is the first album I've heard of theirs. I listened to some samples and was impressed enough to buy the whole album. It smokes! I think what I dig about this album is that it seems to be a bit more rooted in thrash at times. Let's not forget some cool riffs and blast beats - though the blast beats aren't overused. The vocals are of the growling type but a couple of songs ("The Trail in the Snow" and "Northern Star") feature clean vocals which adds some variety. As one could guess by the album title and song titles, the theme of this album is "winter: it's way cool, man." I understand these guys have been writing about winter for their entire careers. I mean, I love winter too but I don't know how many songs I could write about it. I'm a little bummed that it wasn't actually winter when this came out. I feel like it's kind of blasphemy to listen to Wintermetal while in the peak of spring!

Useless Fact: This album shares a label with Grave Robber and Lust Control. Several of the label's bands are charting on the Christian Hard Rock charts. They're starting to turn into the modern equivalent of Intense Records!