Although this is already their seventh full-length release I have never heard music from Totenmond. This South-Germany based trio took a break after the release of Tonberg UrTod to return this year with some new violence, Thronräuber. These three guys combine doom, black, thrash and a little bit punk into one uncompromisable style and till now they were really successful with it, because they for example played almost all major European festivals.

When listening to opener ‘Luzifer Stampft’ I was very surprised, because this isn’t a mixture of doom, black, thrash and punk at all; this is almost entirely a black metal song and nothing more. Not that this track is bad or anything, but I wasn’t expecting anything like this when I was reading their bio. The closing track, which is entitled ‘Luzifer Stampft 2’ is everything but the opener by the way. The black is exchanged for doom and therefore it has a whole other vibe. The beat is very heavy, the song itself is very slow and it contains no samples as an intro or outro.

Between these two totally different, but both killer-tracks you indeed get to hear a mixture of a couple of styles. Where the vocals on ‘Achtung Panzer’ for example have a bit of a death metal-sound, the vocals on ‘Nihil Novi’ sound more black and the vocals on ‘Sonnenstrahl’ vaguely remind me of Rammstein’s ‘Rein Raus’, but the German lyrics probably do add to that comparison. Normally the German lyrics scare me off, but this time they don’t. With the music of Totenmond you aren’t saddled up with the next big thing when it comes to schlager-music, but I can understand why they have more success in German-speaking countries.

After listening to this “new promotional CD, which is property of Massacre Records” – fuck voice-overs! – I really want to hear more of them and I will definitely check their earlier work. The songs are well thought-through, there are some catchy riffs which stick in your head for a while, and most of all the mixture of different genres works really well. They achieve to offer a fan of one of the above mentioned genres enough to buy this record. Thumbs… eh… I mean: horns up!