From the ashes of Domain comes Mexico’s Ravager with their second full length effort Naxzgul Rising. Their stint in the realm of the living was brief, however, splitting shortly before the release of this full length album. The group consists of bassist Sergio Alvarez, former Disgorge (mex) front man Antimo Buonnano, as well as two members from his other group Demonized; drummer Oscar Garcia (not to be confused with the vocalist of Terrorizer) and Samuel Olvera. When I’d first heard Antimo was involved in projects outside of Disgorge, I have to admit I was eager to get my hands on any of them and check them out, the first I heard was Blood Reaping, and everything I’d loved about what he’d done in Disgorge were non-existent. His vocal style was more raspy and far less menacing than what I’d come to expect, and the album, as a whole, was a major disappointment. Luckily, Ravager is much better than Blood Reaping in virtually every category. Musically the group is straight ahead angry satanic blackened death metal, with plenty of blast beats, wailing solos and thick raspy vocals. They don’t really stray much from the formula of the countless other bands playing the same style, but it’s in the moments where they do stray from the norm that they start to set themselves apart from the other bands. The blazing blasts are great and all, but it requires variety, and thankfully Ravager does supply this in moments and those moments are fucking brilliant. Unfortunately, they only seem to slow down for a minute out of every 5 minute track, so for every minute of amazing dark death metal, there’s four minutes of repetitive and boring blasts with no real structure or purpose. When they blast away it’s sort of in the mindless Krisiun manner of just making noise for the sake of being noisy, but when they slow things down and work on developing solid song structure they bring to mind bands like The Chasm, Incantation and the like, without really sounding like any specific band. Sometimes a hint of Disgorge wafts through, but on the whole it’s pretty straight forward. I’d love to hear a full album of the slower-paced material, because the slower bits on tracks like "Foretold", "Crest Of Fallen Divinity" and "In The Depths" rank right up there with the best blackened death metal bands in the scene today. On the 48 minute CD, there’s really only about 10 minutes of really good solid music, and it’s surrounded by boring crap, so it makes the album extremely difficult to get into and be willing to sit around and sit through. I’m hoping the band members try to slow things down in their other projects, because they have a very solid foundation here, they just need to work on song structure a bit more and I think people would be mentioning them in the same breath as Incantation and Immolation. I wouldn’t recommend buying this CD, but if you do pick it up, you should be able to find at least something of value on here. Good, but not great.

Written By: Teufel