Halladrol – The Last Mile on the Earth (2012)

Hailing from Finland, today we have the relatively unknown Halladrol and ‘their’ brand of Blackened Death/Doom Metal. Being a one man project, Halladrol actually combines plenty of influences to make quite a stir, but leave us a bit disappointed with the end results.

Opening with typical 90’s Death Metal guitar riffs, “The Last Mile on the Earth” delivers quite a powerful introduction to this release, but also feels a bit dated in its execution. There are some pretty interesting Avant-garde elements here and there, but the rather simplistic core of the music takes away from any possible magic behind this track. The drumming is pretty intense and the vocals are ok, but there is that feeling of something missing always present in the track.

“Black New Stars” nicely combine heavy riffing and some keyboards to create a very thick atmosphere. There are definitely some nice Thrash-y riffs and solid drumming, this gives way to a hypnotic melodic section that reminds us a bit of earlier Nile (when they started using the Egyptian elements). This song does have an excellent atmosphere, too bad it was kind of ruined again with the simplistic musical core.

The closer “No Rest for the Holy” keeps up the excellent atmospheric work, and this time the guitars are just right for the downward spiral feeling of this song. The vocals are still too overdone in our opinion, and maybe some clean whines or deranged shrieks would work considerably better than growl. This song is again closed in a very Nile and Melechesh style, pretty solid indeed.

There is clear talent behind Halladrol, but the problem of having too many ideas at once is always an issue with one-man bands. There are some elements that are used sporadically that work well, but they are drowned by the simplistic nature of the bass/guitar/drum approach. Maybe with some more time in the oven, the next release of this outfit would be cohesive enough to get a bigger approval.

Release: June 6th, 2012

Country: Finland