HILAL

A perfectly succeeded blend of extreme metal and ethnic North African music. Extremely heavy & progressive metal is alternated with well performed compositions on the oud or as we call it: the Arab lute. Most of this type of bands only add a little bit of ethnic to spice up their music as a sort of gimmic, but here we have the real thing. Abder and Mus are true masters of the oud. Listening to "Hilal" is never boring. We have aggressive grunts over heavy dark metal riffs following fluently sung arabian melodies, accompanied by the oud and ethnic percussion. An album great to discover, the only weak spot being the too machine like sounding drums in the heavy parts, but this seems to be the problem with most power metal bands. In Rotterdam we have lots of ethnic music of all kind, but I wish we had ARKAN !! Danny Martins.