Maveth – Coils Of The Black Earth

In my life, music is a powerful thing.  It is an important thing.  Music is not something that just happens in the background.  I plan around music and going to see bands, hell I even plan when I am going to sit down and listen to music.  It makes sense to me that I enjoy powerful music, and powerful does not necessarily mean loud, heavy, metal, etc.  It means music that moves me and makes me feel.

So here we have, all the way from Finland, a band called Maveth.  And this is powerful music.  This is grim stuff, a little blackened death if you will, and it certainly hit me at a time in my life when it seemed suited to be the soundtrack to my current events. My world has not been pretty lately, in fact I have been dealing with some pretty grim stuff.  Maybe this is just the perfect of example of right place, right time, but this release really hit the spot with me.  Not to say that I want to wallow in the darkness, but when things around you are all black, sometimes you want some music that just fits the situation.

This is the 3rd release for this band.  This is their first full length, the previous releases being a demo and an EP.  And according to their press, they have played a ton of live shows.  It definitely shows up in the music on this release.  They are polished, in a black metal sort of way, and they sound like a band that knows what they are doing.  They are not a young band, in that they have been around for 5 years now, and it could just be that with this release, with the shows they have put behind them, that they are hitting that sweet spot for a band when it all starts to come together.

Maveth play a lot in the mid tempo sandbox, and it creates a very suffocating and brutal effect.  There are some small tempo changes but it's mostly right in the same BPM throughout the album.  You feel as though the sun is blocked out, little by little, as if the walls are closing in on you inch by inch.  By the time you work through the almost hour length of this album, your soul is blacker than it was at the beginning.  It's a little harder to find joy and happiness in life, things don't seem quite as bright.  This is what a really good death metal album will do to you and for you, and “Coils Of The Black Earth” succeeds mightily in this regard.

Sometimes you wanna sing, sometimes you wanna dance, and sometimes you just wanna revel in the fact that life can be shitty, that life can be incomprehensible, that life can tie you to the bumper of a pickup truck and drag you through gravel for a while.  If it's the former that you're after, go find a Chambers Brothers track called “Funky”.  But if, like me right now, you seek the latter, this is the shit you are looking for right here.  Roll in it like a hellhound rolling around in a field of rotting corpses. 

- ODIN