Neaera – Forging the Eclipse (2010)

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Hailing from Germany, today we have Neaera and their crushing Melodic Death Metal that will surely rattle your seat (and windows) once “Forging the Eclipse” starts playing on your stereo. The band’s sound is very brutal in nature and features most of the ‘traditional’ Melodic Death Metal elements but also has a nice modern edge to it, without getting too faggy for us.

After the first few listens we noticed that while “Forging the Eclipse” is a very solid album, it’s very linear in nature and gets repetitive after a few songs. The band’s songwriting abilities are not the best in the scene and even with twelve songs, the album lasts only 39 minutes. The riffing is very brutal and features some nice traditional Death Metal hooks in songs like “Sirens of Black”, but manages to keep an overall melodic tone.

The growls are very brutal and sound great in this release, but the harsh screams are a parade of hits and misses, since sometimes they sound good and most of the times they are very annoying. Since the opening of “Heaven’s Descent” you can listen to the growling powers of Benny, the bands vocalist, but as the screams come in, in this song in particular they sound very annoying. When the vocals are layered, they sound a bit better since the growls dominate them, but separately, they are dreadful in some occasions.

In terms of drumming, Mr. Sebastian Heldt does a great job in crafting a very massive sound with a wide variety of fills and blast-beats. This is probably the element we liked the most in “Forging the Eclipse”, like on the songs “In Defiance” and “Exaltation” you get this massive drumming that feels just right. The typical approach in each song is brutal section, slower part, brutal section, slower part, and you can almost predict most of the songs in this release, making it a linear like we mentioned.

In general, Nearea is not a bad band by any means, but they need to shake things up every once in a while. “Forging the Eclipse” has some nice songs like “The Prophecy”, “Rubikon” and “Sirens of Black”, but after a while they get tired and very predictable. Being the band’s fifth full-length with this name; we expected a bit more mature song writing and more compelling songs.

Band: Neaera Album: Forging the Eclipse
Label: Metal Blade Records

Release: October 20th, 2010

Official Site myspace
Genre: Melodic Death Metal

Country: Germany

Rating: 80/100
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