Lately we at Metalrage.com have the honour of being overwhelmed with albums from Italian metal acts. Most of the time these acts have played in Italy with well known local bands and are circling in the underground for a while. Well the Italian metalcore act Stigma is an exception to this. With shows on Wacken Open Air, Metal Camp and with several great metal acts they are leaving the Italian underground scene. Especially since they’ve just released their debut album called When Midnight Strikes.

 

The first thing I noticed about this album was the artwork by Davide Nadalin (Nile, The Duskfall), which fits the album perfectly because the theme on this album involves vampires and werewolves. After the intro ‘Walpurghis Night’ we’re of to 40 minutes of draculacore in the style of Himsa and The Black Dahlia Murder, at least that’s what the biography told me.

 

The same biography told me about the vampire theme on this album which immediately rose the hair in the back of my neck. You can’t be serious to record an album about vampires in 2008, it’s done a thousand times before. Well luckily for me Stigma proved me wrong right from the beginning of this album. The sound they’ve created is indeed somewhere between Himsa, The Black Dahlia Murder and sometimes even some At The Gates. With a nice mix of brutality and melody they’ve convinced me and already made me curious about their next album.

 

In the end you can laugh about the lyrics or not but the main fact is that Stigma created a sound that has a face of it’s own. So whether you like this Dracula theme or not if you’re into metalcore check this one album out, because if you ignore the samples from time to time you’ll have a great album to add in your collection.