MIND SNARE - Black Crystal Sun MCD + Video

Now here is a death metal band that has been around for just as long as your beloved old school bands, except that they have had almost all of their albums recorded in the 21st century and all of which pretty much still went unnoticed. It doesn't help that Mind Snare  share their name with several other bands, including an Indian one who changed theirs to an ugly Myndsnare to avoid complications, and that was perhaps one of the reasons why I chose to spend my money on my dates instead of getting ensnared in such bands, until I finally got an opportunity to buy their latest MCD and better sense prevailed.

Mind Snare from Italy play unadulterated Death Metal with such a burning passion and irrepressible spirit that depending on your death metal standing, it would either make your head drop down in shame or evoke such an uncontrollable sense of brotherly pride that even the band members would refuse to acknowledge for their safety. Seriously, it's been ages since I heard riffs that were so potent, so pure and vitriolic in its essence that my nerves tingled on the verge of leaving me with quadriplegic paralysis. Riffs that would bear resemblance to the fiendishly caustic ones of Anima Damnata, Throneum and Asphyx, and at the same time, to the chunky pulverising ones of Grave, Vader and Sinister. The final result being a fist-pumping, scream-inducing, poseur-slashing form of death metal which may not be original, but isn't conveniently derivative either.

With Chris creating such an overwhelmingly hateful music, Sergio makes the most of his opportunity to physically vent out his anger, which he does with abandon yet with calculated precision, making you wonder if it's fluke all through. Gigi with his bleeding larynx vocals, vacillating seamlessly from deep growls to vengeful snarls, compels you to take evasive action to prevent blood from spewing all over you. His apt bass-playing hardly seems to impede his pain-inflicting enthusiasm. Black Crystal Sun's unpolished production makes the music on it feel at home, bringing out the true essence of their underground sound without obscuring any of the instruments. The album, however, is completely devoid of leads, a factor that could prove costly to them in the longer version of the album considering their tendency to lapse into playing lacklustre music from an already unoriginal one. Two live songs from the 2005 Obscene Extreme Fest are included on this MCD as a bonus; they are perfectly audible and seem to be wisely selected for they are quite impressive, prodding me further to retrace their discography. Strangely enough, Mind Snare have dedicated a track entirely to a dialogue from the movie Gladiator; even with my considerable experience of genres where intros thrive as if by way of right, I do not recall many instances where bands have a song containing merely a spoken dialogue from a movie which is not an intro/outro. Mind Snare's members must have surely cried watching Gladiator. Brutal.

Black Crystal Sun is a fine little slice of concentrated death metal that will give you your money's worth.