Out of Yesteryear – Mass [2013]
Band: Out Of Yesteryear
Album: Mass
Belarusian metal outfit Out of Yesteryear have experimented quite a bit with their sound since their birth back in 2007. The debut full length The Blackness has a distinctive russian deathcore flavor to it, with lots of symphonic influences to differentiate themselves from the masses. With this long awaited new full lengh called Mass the band has thrown that whole symphonic thing out of the window for a more direct approach, but don’t expect this to be another mediocre deathcore album. Mass can be best described as the perfect definition of blackened death metal, not a bad way to start this newly found sound since that genre is still relatively new and hasn’t established a solid foothold yet. Instead of breakdowns and copy-paste riffs you can expect a monumental effort loaded with good stuff such as finger-bleeding guitar riffage, speaker-busting drumming and of course ridiculously filthy death growls.
I’ll be honest; being the breakdown whore that I am, I don’t give (blackened) death metal bands as much attention as I should, maybe because I’m thinking I have heard it all. Luckily albums like this show me the error of my ways because there is nothing but pure fucking metal to be found in this release. From the relentless death metal attacks being thrown at you to the lenghty melodic guitar solos. every part of Mass shows improvement over the old material. Aside from the furious death metal guitar riffing and soloing Mass often ventures into black metal territory, but quickly crosses the border again towards death metal land (this process is repeated throughout the album), creating something that will be liked by fans of both genres. The exact same can be said about the vocals: the constant stream of death growls being hurled at your face are only interrupted to treat you to its evil-er twin brother: the vicious black metal mid-high schreeching. Both of these vocal assaults are performed flawlessly. Of course one cannot forget about the final aspect that makes this album such a raging beast: the drumming, Denis Poluyan shows his machine skills with both deadly precision and murderous blast beats, forcing the other bandmembers to catch up to his drumwork. All of this combined creates an atmosphere that is simply phenomenal. Ultimately Mass requires lots of replays to hear all the greatness, but no matter how many times you hear it, there are still no flaws to be heard.
With almost 7 years of doing whatever the fuck they like, Out of Yesteryear have touched various genres within the metal universe but it sounds to me that they finally reached the sound they were looking for. With a playtime of nearly 40 minutes Mass is divided into 9 meaty, solid tracks. 2013 seems to be the year for some of the better blackened death metal releases. With a good amount of talented releases out there, Mass can consider itself to be among the best, even without the keyboards. Give the album a spin on their Bandcamp page and proceed to purchase it for 66.6 Euros. That price alone is reason enough to just buy this!
Rating: 9.3/10
For fans of: Behemoth, Sidious, Hypocrisy, Fleshgod Apocalypse, One More Victim
