Miseration – The Mirroring Shadow (2009)

After reviewing several different bands where Christian Älvestam sings or plays something, we finally found one that is pretty solid all around. It’s not that the other bands are bad, but they just don’t feel as cohesive as Miseration.

Miseration hails from Sweden and they play old-school Death Metal. They have greatly improved since their debut album “Your Demons - Their Angels” and this is a good sign since that album showed some promise.

“The Mirroring Shadow” kicks out with a very solid track that has some Cannibal Corpse feeling to it, but the band has their own riffing style that is present throughout the whole album. All the album songs flow pretty much the same way the first track does and if you like the first track then you are completely hooked from start to end.

The vocals as you can expect from Christian, they are pretty solid and have that kind of raspy guttural feeling to them, something I really enjoy of old-school DM. There are some screams here and there, but no faggy clean vocals; this is a straight up Death Metal album. The elements that stands out the most to me is the drumming since it’s very well executed and songs very brutal from start to end. This along with the riffing makes “The Mirroring Shadow” a very good album in my opinion.

This release has some very good moments for moshing and head banging since it has that groovy feeling to the music in some parts of the songs that only a few bands these days can pull off, like Jungle Rot. Some of the best songs of this album include “Sulphury Sun” and “The Mirroring Shadow”.

The other thing I like about this band is that they are not talking about guts, abortions or any of that stuff, I think is ‘traditional’ for Death Metal bands to do that, but after going over 100 releases all talking about the same ‘brutal’ shit it just gets old. The album’s song titles indicate that they are talking about different things and I never heard the word guts when going over this album.

Overall Miseration has managed to improve considerably over their first release and if they keep going this way the band has good potential of releasing even better albums in the future. If you are a DM fan you should definitely get thus release.

Release: November 16, 2009

Country: Sweden