Thy Disease – Anshur-Za (2009)

With a very unconventional sound today we have Thy Disease, a Polish band that will surely turn heads when you are blasting this release through your car stereo or out in your back yard. Starting off a second place finish in Poland’s “Metal Millennium Party” back in 1999, Thy Disease has released 5 full-length albums in over 10 years and it’s finally making its way to America through Armoury Records.

With a very rich mixture of elements in their music, Thy Disease will surely make an impact as one of the bands with one of the most interesting styles in the Metal scene these days. In “Anshur-Za”, the band combines Death/Black Metal elements with some Industrial/Electronic sounds and some interesting chorus sections (featuring clean vocals) that will surely make you scratch your head more than one.

“Anshur-Za” is by no means a completely tripped out release that will make you need a certificate of insanity to fully understand it. This album is rather a very creative approach to Metal and incorporates the ‘trippy’ elements to fully enrich the listeners experience and journey through the band’s own little world. The Metal-structured riffs are solid enough to keep this release grounded in planet Earth and to allow Metalheads to start headbanging since track one of this release.

Like we said, the riffing in “Anshur-Za” is pretty solid and creative enough to not bore the listener. We have plenty of catchy chugging riffs that carry this release from start till end. The use of electronics is very well crafted to give that ‘out of this world’ feeling to this release and to bring the listener to a whole new plane of existence. Paired with the riffing, the band has a sound very similar to Industrial bands like the old The Kovenant, Project Hate, etc.

Besides the guitar work and electronics, the band heavily relies on their harsh vocals. These vocals are greatly offset by catchy chorus sections like on “Code Red”, a song that on our first listen we thought it sucked, but after the second spin of this album we could not get that little section out of our head. There are also plenty of other places that feature clean vocals and sound very different from the ‘main sound’ of the album; we particularly love this since it provides the listener with enough variety to stay engaged with the album.

“Anshur-Za” is a pretty solid effort, but for us it feels a bit ‘all over the place’ sometimes and gets to much work to fully appreciate the full range of capabilities that the band has to offer. If Thy Disease would have saved some elements and ideas for future releases, “Anshur-Za” would have been a more compact and overall solid release than now. Don’t get us wrong, we think this album is very good and original, something that is rare these days, but we think it could have been simpler and still effective enough. We highly recommend this release to any fans of the (older) Industrial Death/Black Metal bands such as Malignant, The Kovenant, etc.

Release: August 10th, 2010

Country: Poland