It’s not very common, but some damn good Estonian death metal reached the Metalrage headquarters recently. The End’s Façade is Horricane’s second full length album since 2005’s The Lynch-Lawers. In the meantime, a lot happened to the band as well as to the progress of their music.

 

First of all the band dropped off the label Black Mark Productions who released their debut album. They did this because of the lack of promotion and attention the label gave to the band. Instead, the band decided to record and release The End’s Façade all by themselves, without any help of any label. A tough decision but it certainly did no harm to their sound.

 

As soon as opening track 'Civilizations Collide' kicks in, you notice what the band stands for. Massive down-tuned mid-tempo death metal with a slight industrial feel to it. Think Vader cutting to 2/3 of their speed rather than usual, mixed with France's pride Gojira, according to their MySpace a big influence. The tracks melt smoothly into each other because of the subliminal use of good intros and outros on most of the tracks, using atmospheric and movie samples, without making it sound like an overkill. The production on the album is, even though it’s a self released album, pretty good actually. It’s a little bit flat from time to time but way better than all the overproduced albums that reach this site lately.

 

Even though I’m not a keyboard fan myself, band member DZDZ does a great job creating an orchestral atmosphere and even sometimes a trance-like one at just the right places. A well done cover of Samael’s 'Rain' puts an end to a fine 45 minutes of pure death metal.

 

Horricane doesn’t explore completely new death metal terrain with this album, but they know how to make a very decent album. The fact that they’ve put so much effort in this and released it themselves makes it even more worthy to check it out and support. Especially Gojira fans, don’t let this album go unnoticed!