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Kerasphorus: Cloven Hooves At The Holocaust Dawn Black Metal, Death Metal Nuclear War Now! Productions February 2nd, 2010
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Review
Cloven Hooves At The Holocaust Dawn is the debut EP from the Blackened Death Metal act Kerasphorus, and it's a pretty intense release. While the EP is only four tracks long, clocking in at a little more than eighteen minutes, it's still packed with plenty of intense music that fits the album's title well. While there's not that much different from track to track, what it lacks in varying structure it makes up for with intensity. Cloven Hooves At The Holocaust Dawn is a blistering release that seems to find it's ground through the usage of practically nothing but blast beats and really slow paced vocals. The only real exception would be the huge change up in music during "Disturb the Furthest Stars" prior to, and during, the guitar solo, with the same being said for near the end of "Swarm Intelligentsia, which seems to be the same as the guitar solo from "Disturb the Furthest Stars". The first two tracks will find the music seem to almost slow down slightly throughout the tracks to give way to a more traditional moment of blast beat, but it doesn't really stray far from the already intense guitar and drum work that adorns the music of this release. While this may sound boring to hear the same type of structure on each song, everything does work out thanks to the great production, and, yes, the slow paced vocal performance. First of all, the production on the release is crisp, but not perfectly clear at all, enhancing the overall feel of aggression and speed in the music. Each track on here comes at you hard, as if taking a hammer straight to your skull, leaving you helpless to do nothing but accept the audio assault that is coming at you. But, while you have almost nothing but blisteringly fast and intense music coming at you, the vocal performance on here is much slower, usually only doing a few words from a sentence. The vocals here are screaming at you, as if commanding you with every word uttered, which really impacts you right at the very end of "Swarm Intelligentsia" thanks to the more emphasized performance that closes the CD out. This style works much better for the release and really pushes the music forward in a demanding way, instead of trying to invoke some sort of inner demon that spouts out lyrics that are long and convoluted which ruins the flow of the song all together. Kerasphorus have put together a very intense debut EP with Cloven Hooves At The Holocaust Dawn, which is really where the band's talent is. The only problem is that each song sounds very similar to one another, and even though the sheer brutality of the music here greatly trumps this issue, you'll be torn with mixed emotions with this release. After a while, the songs will start to become rather bland, but as just so heavy and well performed that you can't look away or hold it against them. The little changes in the flow of the songs do help, but if the band adds a little more to their writing of the material to what we are presented here, Kerasophus will be am unstoppable force of metal mayhem.
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