Carbon

Carbon & Elite Split
Agonia Records, 2003
Genre: Black Metal

Carbon:
1. Descent
Elite:
2. Stanken av Hyklers Blod











Side Elite: here
Side Carbon:

I have never heard of Carbon, so this is a totally new band for me to hear thanks to my interest in getting all of Elite's recordings.  I don't know if I will ever track down the rest of Carbon's recordings anytime soon, so I will stick with trying to review a single song by them.  I don't know how this stacks up against their previous material, but they have a pretty good sound.  This really comes as no surprise to me since it boasts members whom were involved with Astriaal, another great Australian band.  This release is limited to 233 hand-numbered copies.

Carbon play a sort of slow and brooding style of Black Metal.  This is really generated from the slower pacing of the drums.  The guitars are all tremolo picked and played in usual Black Metal fashion, but the slower drums underneath all this give it a much slower feel to the pacing.  It definitely has sort of a strange atmosphere to the music, it's almost hypnotic, but not all the way there.  You can clearly tell they are trying to  generate something like this, but it never quite gets there.  The song is quite good overall and I would recommend giving it a list, but I'm not sure it's good enough to motivate me to rush out and get the rest of their material.

The production is very well done and the vocals are fairly low in the mix.  This is basically the opposite of what Elite did. This was really the only issue that I saw.  Other than that everything is quite well done.

In the end it's an interesting song to listen to... but not overly compelling in my opinion.  I might be interested if they put out something in the future, but this the last thing they've released and it's 2013 as I write this.  I won't hold out for them to release anything soon.