Silent Leges Inter Arma – Silent Leges Inter Arma (2012)

Hailing from Germany, today we have a very interesting sounding Black/Death Metal band named “Silent Leges Inter Arma” and their self-title debut release. While this band has no ‘fancy’ elements on their music, their song writing abilities makes their sound be old school and brutal while still having some modern elements that makes them very unique sounding. If this sounds weird, just imagine Sepultura circa “Morbid Visions” with modern BM elements.

Starting with a very average track titled “We Are”, the band kind of has a pattern in the opening songs of this release of one average track followed by a good one, seems weird it turned out this way (or we liked the album this way). “Falcon-Headed One” delivers quite powerful growls and very interesting guitar work. Here you can perfectly notice the band’s weird and unique sound that makes them different from the rest, maybe comparable to bands like Secrets of The Moon and such in terms of their guitar work.

After another filler (“I Will Hunt You Down”), “Beyond the Light” delivers another dosage of solid riffs and a very brutal Black Metal edge combined with a few interesting slower passages. The acoustic “Shades” nicely provides a mood switch in this release shows a very keen ability of the band to create a dark vibe without the need of additional instruments or atmospheric elements. From this point on the album gets very good with the brutal “For the Dead”, a Black Metal ball-to-the-wall song that is very well crafted and brilliantly executed.

Our favorite song in this release is the 11-minute epic “Wings” and its plethora of solid melodic riffs and powerful drumming. The growls and the guitar solos drive this song home with a very emotional feeling to it. Closing with the Agalloch-ish “In Shadows Again”, we can’t help but wonder if the band actually had two different EP’s worth of music and just sandwiched them into a full-length or why the need to have two very different halves of the album.

In general, we think that Silent Leges Inter Arma is a promising band but they still need to figure out their shit and come up with a cohesive album that flows from beginning to end. We like the riffing, we loved the acoustic sections, and the band melodic passages, but the whole let’s be dirty old-school Death/Black Metal does not really fit into the mold. We recommend this album if you like work-in-progress releases or just need something between aggressive and mellow, and don’t really mind about the quality of it.

Release: October 30th, 2012 (North America)

Genre: Black/Death Metal

Country: Germany