Humanity's Plague Productions, 2013
Genre: Black Metal
1. As Plague Scourge this World Apart
2. Contagion through Aeons
3. Ruined Form Catharsis
4. Depth within Nothingness Called Life
5. Resurgence of Malice
6. Funeral of Decaying World
7. Opus VII (Through the Endless Phantasmagoria)
If anyone out there is familiar with the Black/Death Metal band Bane from Serbia then Paimonia is something you're going to want to hear about. As many Bane fans know, the "band" has basically been moved to Canada. However, this move left behind one of the members, B.V. and he teams up with drummer N.PV. to bring us a whole new project of Serbian Black Metal. There aren't too many bands I listen to from Serbia, but the ones I've heard are quite exceptional and Paimonia is quickly added to my list of recommendations from that region next to bands like The Stone.
"Disease Named Humanity" is the debut album from Paimonia and, unfortunately, I missed out on the the debut EP, but the music was strong enough on here that I believed it needed a more immediate review. As you can imagine the guitar work does hearken back to a feeling of Bane's efforts, but on here they've stripped out all the possible Death Metal elements Doing this gives Paimonia a far more cohesive atmosphere and theme to their music. With an album titled like "Diesease Named Humanity" I was expecting an unbridled level of violence and Paimonia, basically, manage to deliver on that concept. The problem that you can run into with this kind of Black Metal is things can become fairly monotonous pretty quickly, however, Paimonia do a really great job with style. There isn't a moment where I clearly get bored with the music, because Paimonia pay careful attention to keeping their dynamics interesting. Interspersed in the songs you can find some wonderful acoustic guitar work and some very melodic passages blended with some of the more typical dissonant styled Black Metal out of Norway. At times this makes me think if Dissection and Dødheimsgard blended themselves together because Paimonia's music has a sort of beautiful melodic quality while also having a very disturbingly haunting quality. It actually makes for quite a different atmosphere due to the types of blending they are executing with all of it cast in a very violent light, which really seals the presentation together. Just listen to all the elements being included in "Depth within Nothingness Called Life"!
If I had to complain about something, I would probably complain about the vocals. B.V.'s vocals are merely okay. They're pretty thin sounding and, for me, they really lack the necessary attack to complement music of this nature. I feel some work in this area could lead to some incredible improvements if done correctly, even a good studio vocalist would add an entirely new dimension to this.
Other than that the album really is entirely top notch and they are definitely a new Black Metal band to be watching in the future. Hopefully, starting off with a debut full-length this strong won't mar future releases... and if they manage to actually improve on what they've written here, I'll be very pleasantly surprised.
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