Ahret Dev

Ahret Dev - Hellish
Vox Mortis, 1997
Genre: Death Metal

1. Izis Ode
2. The Damned
3. Lords of Illusion
4. Inhumation
5. Eardh Kha Aamon Reeh
6. Archnemezis
7. Seventh Gate
8. Nebirus








When I was ordering some old demos out of Poland the seller decided to include this in my package, probably recognizing I was a major collector of Polish Metal.  I had never heard of Ahret Dev, which makes sense, because this is their only album and it was never released on CD.  Instead it was released on cassette on the now long defunct label Vox Mortis.  However, given what I knew about the Vox Mortis roster, I had decent hopes for what this band would be performing.  Shortly after this a CD was published with both this album and their demo, but that CD is also extremely hard to find and is long out of print.

"Hellish" is, by far, one of the more brutal band performing Death Metal in Poland.  They certainly take a no frills approach to their composition and instead focus on pummeling their listeners into submission with some thick and highly refined Death Metal.  The influences on Ahret Dev are pretty clear and it sort of comes across as some strange combination of Deicide and Suffocation.  Whereas Hate, around this time, was mainly focused on their Deicide influence, Ahret Dev is infusing Suffocation's brutality into their sound and giving it a far more crushing feel than the other bands performing at this time.  There are other Brutal Death bands around Poland at this time, but I didn't think they sounded nearly as refined as Ahret Dev and "Hellish" actually has a bit of the sophisticated songwriting we found on "Pierced Within", which I would reference as Ahret Dev's "go to" album for influence.  I think one of the reasons I like this release so much is because pulling off the Suffocation style is actually really difficult for bands, especially to fuse it with different styles. So, I really can't help but appreciate a band who manages to do this, regardless if they're being original or not.

In the end this band never really went anywhere.  I assume the musicians went on to do other things with their lives, but I don't think it was related to extreme metal.  The most I can find on this history references their involvement with no other bands.  It really would have been interesting to see where this band went in the future had they decided to stay together.  I quite enjoyed listening to this, but maybe I'm in a fairly nostalgic mood, because it sounds like a lot of the 90's Death Metal I loved from America. I am not as interested in American Death Metal anymore and instead follow other scenes these days.